Position in chronology
DP 288
About this tablet
This is a small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Girsu (modern Tello), part of the vast Lagash temple-household archive of the 24th century BCE. It records a delivery or reckoning of split, dried fish — over a thousand units of 'a-dartun' fish — counted by a scribe attached to the office of the ruler (ensi2), involving a group of fishermen and overseen by Enig-gal, a well-known administrator (nubanda, 'overseer') who appears repeatedly in the Lagash economic archive under the rulers Lugalanda and Urukagina. Tablets like this were the routine bookkeeping of a temple economy that tracked food production down to individual fishermen's catches.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is an inventory note: a large quantity — 1,380 units — of split, dried a-dartun fish is recorded, apparently connected to a woman named Lika, though that part of the text is unclear. A scribe working for the city ruler's office tallied the count. The fishermen involved handed their catch (or its reckoning) over to Enig-gal, the overseer, who received it into his charge. A final number, '2,' closes the entry, likely a sub-total or entry marker whose exact function is lost to us.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] split, its (individual) portions: 1380 (2(gešu) 3(geš2)) split a-dartun-fish, split, ... of the woman Lika, the scribe of the ruler (ensi2) — he counted (them). The fishermen: Enig-gal, the overseer (nubanda), they returned into his hand. 2.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[x x] dar-ra [didli]-bi 2(gesz'u@c) 3(gesz2@c) a-dar-tun2 dar-ra x x munus li-ka-kam dub-sar ensi2-ka-ke4 mu-szid szu-ku6-be2-ne en-ig-gal nu-banda3 szu-na mu-ni-gi4-gi4-ne 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 288. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220938) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.