Position in chronology
Adab 0759
About this tablet
A short administrative account from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, written during the Akkadian period (around 2300 BCE). It records large quantities of barley and emmer wheat — roughly ten thousand liters of grain — set aside as 'regular offerings,' the standing daily provisions owed to a temple or institution. The date line names the month of the Akiti, the great new-year festival, tying this delivery to the ritual calendar. It is a small but telling piece of the bookkeeping that kept Mesopotamian temples fed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a grain ledger entry: 38 gur, 3 barig — less 2 sila and 10 shekels — of barley (in round terms, over eleven thousand liters) delivered as the regular, fixed offerings. A second entry adds 2 gur and 1 barig of emmer wheat, though the start of that line is broken away. A third line survives only in traces and cannot be read. The record closes with its date: the month of the Akiti festival. In short: the standing grain provisions for the festival month, duly booked.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 38 gur 3 barig less 2 sila and 10 shekels of [barley], (by the) gur (measure), as regular offerings (sa₂-du₁₁); [...] 2 gur 1 barig of emmer; [...] ... (traces, perhaps 'a'); (reverse) Month: Akiti.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
3(u) 8(asz) 3(barig) la2 2(disz) sila3 1(u) gin2 [sze] gur sa2-du11 [...] 2(asz) 1(barig) ziz2 gur [...] a? iti# a2-ki-ti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0759. 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 (P217523) — 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.