Position in chronology
Adab 0669
About this tablet
An Old Akkadian accounting tablet from Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), roughly 2300–2200 BCE, tallying grain. Two men, Ur-Iškur and Me-sag, are debited or credited with measures of barley and emmer; larger amounts are then assigned to the governor's brewery and the governor's kitchen, the two great food-processing departments of the provincial household. The clerk notes that separate entries were reckoned together as a single sum, and closes with a grand total of barley. It is the ordinary bookkeeping that kept a Mesopotamian governor's household fed and supplied with beer.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley and emmer, itemized. Ur-Iškur: 2 gur of barley less 7 sila, plus 1 gur 2 ban 5 sila of emmer. Me-sag: 10 gur of barley. A few entries here are lost. Then 4 gur of barley and 3 gur of emmer, which the accountant combined and booked as a single figure. Fifty gur and 3 barig went to the governor's brewery; nine gur to the governor's kitchen. The tablet closes with a total of barley — [x+]2 gur, 2 barig, 2 sila — though the leading figure is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 2 gur less 7 sila of barley, 1 gur 2 ban 5 sila of emmer: Ur-Iškur. 10 gur of barley: Me-sag. [...] [...] ... [...] Reverse 4 gur ... of barley, 3 gur [...] of emmer — as one (sum) it was reckoned. 50 gur 3 barig [...]: the brewery of the governor. 9 gur (10 less 1) [of ...]: the kitchen of the governor. [Total: x+]2 gur 2 barig 2 sila of barley.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
2(asz@c) la2 7(disz) sila3 sze gur# 1(asz@c) 2(ban2@c) 5(disz) sila3 ziz2 gur ur-iszkur 1(u@c) sze gur me-sag7 [...] [...] x [...] 4(asz@c)# x sze [gur] 3(asz@c) [...] ziz2 gur 1(disz@t)-a i3-szid 5(u@c) 3(barig@c) [...] gur e2-bappir# ensi2-ka 1(u) la2 1(asz@c) [...] e2#-muhaldim ensi2-ka [szunigin x] 2(asz@c) 2(barig@c) 2(disz) sila3 sze gur
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0669. 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 (P217482) — 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.