Position in chronology
Adab 0676
About this tablet
A small clay docket from Adab (modern Bismaya) in southern Iraq, written under the Akkadian empire, roughly 2300–2150 BCE. It is a personnel roster: an official lists five able-bodied men by name, identifying two of them by their brothers and one as a servant of the king, then totals them at the bottom. The names are a telling mix — Sumerian ones like Lu-dingira and Lugal-entarsu alongside Akkadian ones like Iqbi-gi and Beli-laba — exactly the bilingual workforce one expects in a provincial city absorbed into Sargon's empire.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Five men on the list. One: Lu-dingira, a royal servant. Two: Bar-ra-dingir, brother of Me-sag. Three: Lugal-entarsu. Four: Iqbi-gi, brother of Beli-laba. Five: a man whose name ended in -šarrum; the beginning is broken away. The tally on the back reads: five workmen in all — apparently scribes, though that last line is badly worn.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (person): Lu-dingira, servant of the king. 1: Bar-ra-dingir, brother of Me-sag. 1: Lugal-entarsu. 1: Iqbi-gi, brother of Beli-laba. [1: ...]-šarrum. (reverse) Total: 5 workmen. [Scribe?]s they are.
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(asz@c) lu2-dingir-ra _ARAD2_ lugal 1(asz@c) bar-ra-dingir szesz me-sag7 1(asz@c) lugal-en3!(SZA)-tar-su3 1(asz@c) iq-bi2-gi szesz# be-li2-la-ba [1(asz@c) x]-szar-ru-um szunigin 5(asz@c) gurusz# [dub?]-sar# me
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0676. 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 (P217485) — 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.