Position in chronology
Adab 0745
About this tablet
An Old Akkadian administrative receipt from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, roughly 2300 BCE. It records two batches of freshly threshed barley, credited to two named plowmen, brought in from an outlying fortified storage point and deposited into a household granary under the supervision of a scribe. The closing note 'second time' shows this was one installment in an ongoing series of deliveries — routine but precise bookkeeping from the world's earliest bureaucracies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Delivery record: just under 9 gur of barley from Lugal-igitab and a bit over 5 gur (8 less 3) from Lugal-ĝeš — grain that the plowmen had threshed. It came in from the fort of Ur-ab. Inima the scribe handled the delivery and had the barley loaded into the storehouse of A-me. This is the second such delivery in the series.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine9 less 1 gur of barley — Lugal-igitab; 8 less 3 gur of barley — Lugal-ĝeš: [barley] threshed, of the plowmen, from the fort of Ur-ab. Inima, the scribe, delivered (it); into the house of A-me he filled it. It is the second time.
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
9(disz) la2 1(asz@c) sze gur lugal-igi-tab 8(asz) la2 3(asz@c) sze gur lugal#-gesz [sze] gesz# ra-a engar-e-ne bad3 ur-ab-ta inim-ma dub-sar-e mu-kux(DU) e2# a2-me3-ka an-si a-ra2 2(disz@t)-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0745. 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 (P217516) — 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.