Position in chronology
Adab 0727
About this tablet
An administrative account from the Old Akkadian period (around 2300 BCE) from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, tallying barley and emmer wheat issued for making beer and bread. The rations are computed as daily rates over stretches of 7, 5, and 8 days, then totalled in large gur-measures. Strikingly, the recipient (or responsible official) is a muš-laḫ, a 'snake charmer' — a recognized cultic profession in Mesopotamia — showing that even such specialists were fed and accounted for by the bureaucracy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
An expense ledger for food and drink supplies: 15 liters of barley a day for beer, at the standard offering rate, over 7 days; then about 37 liters of barley (less a small fraction) for bread and 12 liters of emmer wheat for bread over 5 days; then 57 liters of barley a day for beer over 8 days, plus roughly 28.5 liters a day of barley for bread and 6 more liters of something now lost, over a number of days that is broken away. The grand totals come to about 13 gur of barley and just under 2 gur of emmer. The account is charged to the snake charmer; the final line, perhaps a name, is broken.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 ban 5 sila of barley for beer, gur(-measure), at the regular-offering (sattukku) rate, for 7 days; 3 ban 7 sila less 10 shekels of barley for bread, 1 ban 2 sila of emmer for bread [...], for 5 days; 1 barig less 3 sila of barley for beer each, for 8 days; 3 ban less 1 1/2 sila of barley for bread each, 6 sila [...], for [n] days. Total: 13(?) [gur, n sila ... of barley]; total: 2 gur less 1 barig, [n x sila of emmer]. (For) the snake-[charmer]. Im(?)-[...] (rest broken).
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
1(ban2) 5(disz) sila3 sze kasz gur sa2-du11-ta u4 7(disz@t)-sze3 3(ban2)# 7(disz) sila3 la2 1(u) gin2 sze ninda 1(ban2)# 2(disz) sila3 ziz2 ninda [...] u4# 5(disz)-[sze3] 1(barig@c) la2 3(disz) sila3 sze# kasz-ta u4 8(disz@t)-sze3 3(ban2@c) la2 1(disz) 1/2(disz) sila3 sze ninda-ta 6(disz) sila3 [...] u4 [n-sze3] szunigin 1(u@c) 3(asz@c)#? [n sila3 ... sze gur] szunigin 2(asz@c) la2 1(barig@c) [n x sila3 ziz2 gur] musz-[lah6] im#?-[...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0727. 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 (P217511) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.