Position in chronology
Adab 0684
About this tablet
A Sargonic-period (Old Akkadian, roughly 2300 BCE) accounting tablet from Adab, in southern Iraq. It tracks enormous quantities of barley — well over a thousand gur, hundreds of thousands of liters — booked against named fields and placed under the responsibility of two commissioners, En-abzu and Inim-ma, then totals the associated field rent in silver and a flock of forty-three sheep, some credited against silver and some against barley. Documents like this are the paperwork of a large institutional estate, showing how a temple or palace household in Adab measured its harvest, collected its dues, and assigned personal accountability for each block of grain.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The account opens with 1,525 gur 1 barig 3 ban of barley charged to the commissioner En-abzu. A second lot of 1,011 gur (1,020 less 9) covers the fields Za-til and GAN2-ISZ, with Inim-ma as the responsible commissioner. A further, partly broken entry adds 227 gur 1 barig. The summary lines then give a grand total of 431 gur 1 barig 3 ban 5 sila of barley, a grand total of 1 mina 4 shekels plus a quarter-shekel and 2½ grains of silver as the field's interest or rent, and a grand total of 43 sheep — some reckoned in silver, some in barley, 22½ of the latter. The last three lines, including an obscure reduplicated entry, a word meaning 'stationed' and a closing predicate, are too broken to make sense of.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1,525 gur 1 barig 3 ban2 of barley — En-abzu (was) the commissioner. 1,011 gur of barley (1,020 less 9) — field Za-til, field GAN2-ISZ: Inim-ma (was) the commissioner. [...] 227 gur 1 barig of barley. [Grand total:] 431 gur 1 barig 3 ban2 5 sila of barley. Grand total: 1 mina 4 shekels, one-quarter (shekel), 2½ grains of silver — the interest/rent of the field. Grand total: 43 sheep — sheep (paid in) silver, sheep (paid in) barley: 22½. pa-LAGAB-pa-LAGAB-ba (unexplained entry) [...] stationed (present). [...] it is.
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
2(gesz'u@c)# 5(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) 5(asz@c) 1(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) sze gur en-abzu maszkim 1(gesz'u@c) 7(gesz2@c) la2 9(asz@c) sze gur GAN2 za-til GAN2 GAN2-ISZ inim-ma maszkim [...] 3(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 7(asz@c) 1(barig@c) sze [gur] [szunigin-szunigin] 7(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 1(asz@c)# 1(barig@c)#? 3(ban2@c) 5(disz) sila3 sze gur szunigin-szunigin 1(asz@c) ma-na 4(asz@c) gin2 igi 4(disz@t) sze 2(disz@t) 1/2(disz) ku3-babbar masz GAN2 szunigin-szunigin 4(u@c) 3(asz@c) udu ku3 udu sze 2(u) 2(disz@t) 1/2(disz) pa#-LAGAB#-pa-LAGAB-ba [...] gub#-ba [...]-am3#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0684. 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 (P217488) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
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.