Over roughly a century and a half of the Early Dynastic III period, the Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma repeatedly fought over the Gu-edena, a fertile irrigated plain on their common border, in the earliest interstate territorial conflict documented in writing. According to the later cones of Enmetena, an earlier boundary had been fixed by arbitration under Mesilim of Kish; when Ush of Umma removed Mesilim's stele and occupied the field, Eannatum of Lagash defeated Umma c. 2450 BCE and imposed a sworn boundary, commemorated on the Stele of the Vultures found at Girsu (Tello) and now in the Louvre, with Gu-edena declared the property of Lagash's god Ningirsu and Umma required to pay for barley grown there. Fighting resumed under Enmetena, who records defeating the Umma rulers Ur-Lumma and Il over the diversion of boundary channels, and around 2350 BCE Lugalzagesi of Umma conquered Lagash, ending its First Dynasty. Almost everything known comes from Lagash's own royal inscriptions and monuments, so the narrative of Umma as the aggressor is one side's account, and the stele's numbers and imagery of piled corpses are royal and religious propaganda rather than records.
The neighbouring Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma fought for generations over the Gu-edena farmland on their shared frontier, with Lagash's rulers Eannatum and Enmetena seizing and holding it by force until Lugalzagesi of Umma conquered Lagash itself
There is no census or administrative count for the Early Dynastic city-states involved; the contested land is known only by name from royal inscriptions and its location has not been fixed, so any share would be invented.
No death toll can be given. The only figure, Eannatum's claim on the Stele of the Vultures that Umma's corpses numbered 3,600 (one šar, a conventional large round number) and that he heaped up twenty burial mounds, is a victor's boast in a religious-royal monument with no independent check, and no source records losses for the other campaigns or for Lugalzagesi's conquest of Lagash.
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