Position in chronology
Adab 0933
About this tablet
A small receipt from Adab, a Sumerian city in southern Iraq, written around 2300–2200 BCE when the region was part of the Akkadian empire. It records two outgoing payments: sesame (the main oil crop) to one man, and a small amount of flour for making a drink or brew to another. The summary line marks them as expenditures, and the last name is probably the official responsible for them. Thousands of these small dockets survive from Adab. Together they show how day-to-day supplies were tracked in a provincial town under the first empire in history.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A'a'a received two barig of sesame. Lugal-tešmu received one ban and (probably) three sila of flour to be used for a drink. Both are booked as expenditures of sesame. The docket ends with the name Ur-Emah, probably the official who authorised or accounted for the payments.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 2 barig of sesame: A'a'a. 1 ban (and) 3(?) sila of 'drinking-stuff' flour: Lugal-tešmu. Reverse: Sesame (and flour) expended; Ur-Emah.
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(barig@c) sze gesz-i3 a-a-a 1(ban2@c) 3(disz)#? sila3 zi3 nig2-nagx(|URUxA|)-ga2 lugal-tesz2-mu gesz-i3 zi-ga ur-e2-mah#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0933. 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 (P217577) — 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.