Position in chronology
DP 336
About this tablet
This small clay tablet from Girsu (ancient Tello), dating to the Early Dynastic IIIa period, is a short administrative account listing bread, cakes, meat, and fish. It records supplies delivered to or consumed by the 'women's house' (e2-munus), a well-known institution in the Lagash temple economy that organized female laborers, often weavers, under royal or temple sponsorship. Tablets like this one are the ordinary bookkeeping of a large redistributive household — mundane in content but invaluable for reconstructing daily food allocation and institutional structure in one of the earliest literate societies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a small ration or supply account. It lists twenty small loaves of a bread type called sur, ten more sur-loaves associated with oxen, ninety loaves of another kind (sal4), and five loaves of a third kind (NI). It also records a single pressed sur-cake, one finished gug2-cake, one ox rib, and three prepared gir2-fish. Everything on this list belongs to, or was issued to, the 'women's house' — an institutional household of female workers attached to the local temple economy.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine20(?) small sur-bread(s) 10 sur-bread(s), (for) oxen 90 sal4-bread(s) 5 NI-bread(s) 1 sur-gug2-cake 1 gug2-cake, finished (šu-du7-a) 1 ox rib 3 gir2-fish, prepared (du3-a) (For/Of) the women's house (e2-munus).
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
2(u@c)#? [ninda] sur# tur-tur 1(u@c) sur gu4 1(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) ninda sal4 5(asz@c) ninda NI 1(asz@c) gug2 sur 1(asz@c) gug2 szu du7-a 1(asz@c) ti gu4 3(asz@c) ku6 gir2 du3-a e2-munus
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 336. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220986) — 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.