Position in chronology
Adab 0660
About this tablet
An Old Akkadian ration or grain-allotment list from Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), now in the Oriental Institute in Chicago. It records measures of barley — counted in gur, the big capacity unit — issued to named men and to officials identified by their posts: a chief lamentation-priest, a chief boatman, two viziers (one attached to a household called the E-duga), and a pair of gardeners. The left side of the tablet is broken away, so most of the quantities are lost, but the structure is clear: title or name on one side, grain on the other. It is the ordinary bookkeeping of a city's temple or palace household, the kind of document that shows us who actually drew rations in a Mesopotamian city around 2300 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening entries are damaged — something about a courtyard, then a man named Šeš-šeš, then a gur of grain (the figure is broken) for the chief lamentation-priest, an amount for the chief boatman, an amount for Sag-ad-gal, an amount for the vizier of the E-duga household, and another vizier whose entry is lost. The legible part of the account then runs: one gur for E-pa'e and Ur-Ašgi, who are the gardeners; one gur for Ur-GAN₂-IŠ and Lugal-KA; one gur for Su-bir-a.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] courtyard, hand(?) [...] [...] Šeš-šeš [1 gur?], the chief lamentation-priest [...] [...] the chief boatman [...] Sag-ad-gal [...] the vizier of the E-duga [...] the vizier [...] 1 (gur) — E-pa'e and Ur-Ašgi: they are the gardeners. 1 (gur) — Ur-GAN₂-IŠ and Lugal-KA. 1 (gur) — Su-bir-a.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] kisal szu#? [...] [...] szesz-szesz [1(asz)?] gala-mah [...] [...] ma2-lah5-gal [...] sag-ad2-gal2 [...] sukkal e2-du10-ga [...] sukkal [...] 1(asz) <gur> e2-pa-e3 u3 ur-aszgi nu-kiri6-me 1(asz) ur-GAN2-ISZ u3 lugal-KA 1(asz@c) su-birx(|SZIMxNIG2|)-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0660. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA (P217477) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.