Position in chronology
Adab 0693
About this tablet
An administrative register from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, written during the Akkadian (Sargonic) period, roughly 2300 BCE. A scribe is inventorying orchards — date-palm and fruit gardens — one by one, naming the man responsible for each, and anchoring the list with landmarks such as private houses and a mound called 'the hill of Gilgamesh.' It is a small window into how the Akkadian state kept track of productive garden land, and a rare everyday mention of the name Gilgamesh attached to a real place on the ground.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a land survey of garden plots, though its opening lines are lost. What survives reads like a checklist: one orchard assigned to Nar-..., one to Lu-banda, one to Ur-mes, two orchards at Nippur, one to Ur-ba..., one to Pirig-nam, and one to Ur-..., with the entries keyed to local landmarks — the house of Gab-..., the house of Dada, and the mound of Gilgamesh. The document closes with a grand total, but the number and the name attached to it are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Break — beginning lost) [...] [...] [...] the house of Gab-[...]; 1 orchard: Nar-[...]; 1 orchard: Lu-banda; the house of Dada; 1 orchard: Ur-mes; the mound of Bilgames (Gilgamesh); 2 orchards: Nippur; 1 orchard: Ur-ba-[...]; [1 orchard:] Pirig-nam; (line broken) 1 orchard: Ur-[...]; Total(?): [n ...]-sag.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] [...] [...] e2 gab2-[...] 1(disz@t) kiri6 nar-[...] 1(disz@t) kiri6 lu2-banda3 e2 da-da 1(disz@t) kiri6 ur-mes du6 bil3-ga-mes 2(disz@t) kiri6 nibru 1(disz@t) kiri6 ur-ba-[...] [1(disz@t)] [kiri6] pirig-nam# [...] 1(disz@t)# kiri6 ur-[...] szunigin#? [n ...]-sag
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0693. 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 (P217492) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.