Position in chronology
Adab 0961
About this tablet
This is a short grain account from Adab, a Sumerian city in southern Iraq now called Bismaya, written in the time of the Akkadian empire (around 2300–2200 BCE). It lists barley allotted to three men, Ur-e, Ur-Ištaran and E-zida, and then gives a total. The name Ur-Ištaran means 'servant of Ištaran', a god whose cult centre was at Der, on the border with Iran. The scribe's total is one barig larger than the entries add up to. It is a small, everyday example of the bookkeeping that ran Mesopotamian households and estates.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley allotments: Ur-e gets 5 gur, 2 barig and 3 ban. Ur-Ištaran gets 2 gur. E-zida gets 1 barig short of 5 gur. The back of the tablet gives the total as 12 gur, 2 barig and 3 ban of barley, which comes to several thousand liters of grain. The listed amounts actually add up to one barig less than this.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 5 gur 2 barig 3 ban of barley: Ur-e; 2 [gur]: Ur-Ištaran; 5 [gur] less 1 barig: E-zi[da]. Reverse Total: 12 gur 2 barig 3 ban of barley.
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
5(asz@c) 2(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) sze gur ur-e2 2(asz@c) ur-isztaran 5(asz@c) la2 1(barig@c) e2-zi-[da] szunigin 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) 2(barig@c)# 3(ban2@c) sze gur
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0961. 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 (P217590) — 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.