Position in chronology
Adab 0772
About this tablet
An administrative account from the Sargonic (Old Akkadian) period, found at Adab in southern Iraq. It is a short roster: five men are listed, each against a quantity — most receiving two units, one (Lugal-igi) eleven — with a final broken entry mentioning two measures of field land under a man named Ur-Ištaran. Whether the numbers count workers, rations, or plots is no longer certain, but the tablet is a snapshot of the everyday bookkeeping by which a provincial Mesopotamian administration tracked people and land around 2300 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tally sheet. Five names, each with a number beside it: two for a man whose name is partly lost (something-tar-something), two for Lugal-itida, two for Ur-Niluda, two for Akadi, and eleven for Lugal-igi. Then, after a gap, a final line notes two measures of field assigned to — or accounted under — Ur-Ištaran. The top of the tablet and part of the last section are broken away, so we can't say what commodity or duty the numbers refer to, but the structure is that of a routine distribution or assignment list.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 2 — ...-tar-..., 2 — Lugal-iti[da], 2 — Ur-[Niluda?], 2 — Akadi, 11 — Lugal-igi. (reverse) [...] 2 (units of) field (GAN2): Ur-Ištaran.
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
2(asz@c) x x-tar-x 2(asz@c) lugal-iti-[da] 2(asz@c) ur-[ni-lu-da?] 2(asz@c) a-ka-di# 1(u) 1(asz@c) lugal-igi [...] 2(disz) GAN2 ur#-isztaran
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0772. 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 (P217525) — 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.