Position in chronology
Adab 0951
About this tablet
A small receipt from the Sargonic city of Adab in southern Iraq, about 2300 BCE, recording sesame, the ancient Near East's main oil-seed. Several people, including a chief constable and a chief smith, each account for a few measures, which are totalled at one gur. A man named Ur-gu brings it in and the estate's chief administrator signs for it. It is a record of how a large Akkadian-period household tracked small deliveries of oil crops from its staff.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Sesame receipt: two measures from the chief constable, one from the chief smith, and one from Lugal-ušur, who is probably also a smith. The next entry is broken away. Altogether this comes to one full gur of sesame. Ur-gu delivered it, and the estate's administrator received it.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 2 barig of sesame: the chief constable (gal-la-gal); 1 barig: the chief smith; 1 barig: Lugal-ušur, [the smith?]; [...] Reverse Total: 1 gur of sesame. Ur-gu delivered it; the household administrator received it.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
2(barig@c) sze gesz-i3 gal5-la2-gal 1(barig@c) simug-gal 1(barig@c) lugal-uszur4 [simug?] [...] szunigin 1(asz@c) sze gesz-i3 gur ur-gu mu-kux(DU) szabra e2 szu ba-ti#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0951. 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 (P217586) — 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.