Position in chronology
Adab 0938
About this tablet
This is a small receipt from the storerooms of Adab, a Sumerian city in southern Iraq, written during the Akkadian period (about 2300–2200 BCE). It records barley taken out of a sealed storehouse and handed to three people: some to be ground into groats, some as part of a swap of old barley, and a smaller amount to a cook. The totals add up correctly (3 gur + 3 gur + 1 barig = 6 gur 1 barig). The name En-annatum at the end is probably the official in charge of the issue. It shows how carefully grain stores were controlled in the time of the first Mesopotamian empire.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley issued from the sealed storehouse: Mesag gets 3 gur to be ground into groats. Zatum gets 3 gur as the principal amount in an exchange for old barley. Kirbanum the cook gets 1 barig. That comes to 6 gur and 1 barig of barley in all, released from the sealed store. Responsible official: En-annatum.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. 3 gur of barley: 2. barley for groats, 3. (for) Mesag. 4. 3 (gur), principal: an exchange made for old barley, 5. (for) Zatum. Reverse 6. 1 barig: Kirbanum, the cook. 7. Total: 6 gur 1 barig of barley, 8. barley brought out of the sealed storehouse. 9. En-annatum.
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
3(asz@c) sze gur sze nig2-ar3-ra-sze3 me-sag2 3(asz@c) sag szu-bala ak sze sumun za3-tum 1(barig@c) kir-ba-num2 muhaldim szunigin 6(asz@c) 1(barig@c) sze gur sze e2-kiszib3-ba-ta e3 en#-an-na-tum2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0938. 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 (P217578) — 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.