Position in chronology
Adab 0892
About this tablet
This is a receipt for a barley delivery from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, written during the Akkadian period (about 2300–2150 BCE). Two consignments are listed, each named with the people it came from and the person who brought it in: one handled by an overseer named U-ru and one brought by a woman named Geme-arsar. The scribe then adds them up to 27 gur, which is several thousand litres of grain. The arithmetic checks out, and it shows how carefully grain was tracked as it moved into a local storehouse.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: 17 gur of barley from [...]-enki and Ur-gal, brought in by the overseer U-ru. Another 10 gur of barley from Lu-gu-mu-da, brought in by Geme-arsar. That makes 27 gur of barley in total. On the back, the barley is entered for the house of Ka-gula (a reading that isn't certain), recorded as loaded and counted as one lot. The first line is broken, and the tablet's last line is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse [17 (20 minus 3) gur of barley]: [...]-enki and Ur-gal; U-ru, the overseer, brought it. 10 gur of barley: Lu-gu-mu-da; Geme-arsar brought it. Total: 27 (30 minus 3) gur of barley. Reverse ... [...] house of Ka-gula (?) was loaded (?); it was counted as one (lot). [...] ... [...]
Our translation engine — Opus 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(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) sze gur] [...]-en-ki u3 ur-gal u2-ru14 ugula mu-kux(DU) 1(u@c) sze gur lu2-gu4-mu2-da geme2-ar3-sar mu-kux(DU) szunigin 3(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) sze gur x [...] e2 ka2?-gu-la an-si 1(disz@t)-a i3-szid [...] x x [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0892. 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 (P217564) — 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.