Position in chronology
Adab 0941
About this tablet
This is a short storage or accounting note from Adab, a Sumerian city in southern Iraq now called Bismaya. It dates to the time of the Akkadian empire, around 2300–2150 BCE. It records a large amount of barley and a smaller amount of emmer wheat, each linked to a 'barber's house' in the quarter where the city's craftsmen lived. The repeated word 'Ansi' may be a person's name or an administrative term. Either way, the tablet shows grain being tracked in the neighbourhoods of a working city, not only in the big temples.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The note starts with the word Ansi. It records 41 gur, 4 ban and 5 sila of barley, kept at the barber's house in the craftsmen's quarter, and Ansi appears again after this entry. On the reverse, the first figure is partly broken off: some quantity plus about 3 gur of emmer wheat, kept at the outer barber's house in the same craftsmen's quarter. The note ends with Ansi once more.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse [An]si. [4]1 gur, 4 ban, 5 sila of barley: [at the] barber's house, in the residence of the craftsmen. Ansi. Reverse [...] 3(?) gur of emmer: [at the] outer barber's house, in the residence of the [cra]ftsmen. [An]si.
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
[an]-si [4(u@c)] 1(asz@c) 4(ban2@c) 5(disz@t) sila3 sze gur [e2] szu-i ki-tusz gesz-kin-ti-ka an-si [...] 3(asz@c)? ziz2 gur [e2] szu-i bar-ra ki-tusz [gesz]-kin#-ti-ka [an]-si
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0941. 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 (P217580) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.