Position in chronology
Adab 0926 + 1076
About this tablet
This is a delivery receipt from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, written around 2300–2200 BCE when the Akkad dynasty ruled Mesopotamia. It records grain going into an institutional storehouse: a small amount of barley and a much larger amount of emmer wheat. The note "second time" shows that the grain came in several instalments, each recorded on its own tablet. Small tablets like this were the everyday bookkeeping of the large households that fed Adab's workers and officials.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received into the granary storehouse: 2 gur of barley and 12 gur, 1 barig and 4 ban of emmer wheat. This is the second delivery. That is the whole record. The back of the tablet carries only the delivery number and is otherwise blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 2 gur of barley; 12 gur 1 barig 4 ban of emmer: to the storehouse of the granary it was brought in. Reverse Second time (delivery no. 2). (rest of reverse uninscribed)
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(asz@c) sze gur 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) 1(barig@c) 4(ban2@c) ziz2 gur e2-nig2-gur11 ganun-ka ba-kux(KWU636) a-ra2 2(disz@t)-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0926 + 1076. 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 (P217575) — 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.