Position in chronology
Adab 0806
About this tablet
A small clay account from Adab (modern Bismaya) in southern Iraq, written in the Old Akkadian period, when the city of Agade — Akkad itself — was the imperial capital. It records issues of barley measured in gur, barig and ban, given out as rations to servants of the king and to the staff of a named household, with a man called Bizaza signing off as the official who released the grain. It is a plain piece of state bookkeeping, but it shows the machinery by which an imperial capital's demands reached down into a provincial town's granary.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Grain ledger: 4 gur and (about) 3 ban of barley, charged to Agade — rations for the king's servants and for the staff of the household of [name lost]. A further amount of barley in gur follows, connected with the king (or with Ur), then 2 barig for a man whose name ends in -dada. The grain was released by Bizaza. Several figures and names are broken away and cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. 4 gur [3 ban] of barley — (from/for) Agade; 2. barley rations of the servant(s) of the king 3. and the servant(s) of the house of [...]; 4. [n] gur of barley, 5. the king (of?) Ur [...]; Reverse 6. 2 barig [...] 7. ...-dada; 8. issued (by) Bizaza.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
4(asz) [3(ban2)] sze# gur a-ga-de3 sze-ba _ARAD2_ lugal# u3 _ARAD2_ e2-[...]-x-sze [...] sze gur lugal# uri5 [...] 2(barig) [n ...] x-da-da e3 bi2-za-za
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0806. 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 (P217534) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.