Position in chronology
Adab 0828
About this tablet
A small Old Akkadian accounting tablet from Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), roughly the 23rd century BCE. It records barley charged to two men — Lu-sa, a farmer, and Bara-nam, a temple official — each with an additional small amount booked as a ferry or haulage charge, and ends by noting that a priest of the god Enlil took delivery of the summed grain. It is exactly the kind of routine grain-and-transport receipt that kept a Mesopotamian temple economy running, down to the surcharge for moving the barley by water.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Grain account: 5 gur and 3 ban of barley, plus 1 ban charged as the transport fee — booked to Lu-sa the farmer. Then 2 gur, 2 barig, 1 ban and 5 sila of barley, plus 5 sila as transport fee — booked to Bara-nam, the nueš-priest. Total: 1 barig of barley. Received by I-nin-mu-du, nueš-priest of Enlil.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 5 gur of barley, 3 ban — 1 ban (as) ferry/transport fee(?) — Lu-sa, the farmer. 2 gur 2 barig of barley, 1 ban 5 sila — 5 sila (as) ferry/transport fee — Bara-nam, the nueš-priest. (reverse) Total: 1 barig of barley. I(d)-nin-mu-du, the nueš-priest of Enlil, received (it).
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
5(asz) sze gur 3(ban2@c) 1(ban2@c) addir!(BI-GISZ) lu2-sa6 engar 2(asz) 2(barig) sze gur 1(ban2@c) 5(disz) sila3 5(disz) sila3 addir# bara2-nam nu-esz3 szunigin 1(barig@c) sze i7-nin-mu-du en-lil2-la2 nu-esz3 szu ba-ti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0828. 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 (P217540) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.