Position in chronology
Adab 0663
About this tablet
A labour and wage account from Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq) written under the Akkadian (Sargonic) empire. It records a gang of ten hired men, what they were paid for one month — barley for food, oil, and ten shekels of silver, one shekel per man — and then sums those costs together with other, now-lost entries. The detail that the barley is reckoned 'of Agade' is telling: the imperial capital's measuring standard was being used in a provincial town, a small trace of how Sargon's dynasty tried to run its empire on a single set of weights and measures.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Ten workers. Their grain allowance: two gur, measured by the Akkad standard. Their oil: five sila. Their pay: ten shekels of silver. Period covered: one month. Charged to Adab. Grand totals for the account: half a mina plus some shekels of silver (the exact figure is broken away), seven gur of grain on the Akkad standard, and two ban of oil. The last entries — a balance outstanding against Gissu, and something concerning a household or estate — are damaged and cannot be fully read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 workmen [...] Their barley: 2 gur, (by the measure of) Agade. Their oil: 5 sila. Their wages: 10 shekels of silver. For 1 month. From Adab. Total: 1/2 [mina, n shekels of silver]. Total: 7 gur of barley, (by the measure of) Agade. Total: 2 ban of oil. Remainder(?): Gissu. The house(?) [...]
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
1(u) gurusz [...] sze-bi 2(asz@c) gur a-ga-de3[] i3-bi 5(disz@t) sila3 a2-bi 1(u@c) gin2 ku3-babbar iti 1(disz@t)-a-kam adab-ta szunigin# 1/2(disz)# [ma-na n gin2 ku3-babbar] szunigin# 7(asz@c) sze gur a#-ga#-de3# szunigin 2(ban2@c) i3 la2-ia3 gissu# e2#? [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0663. 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 (P217479) — 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.