Position in chronology
Adab 0968
About this tablet
A short grain account from Adab in southern Iraq, written in the Old Akkadian period (about 2300–2150 BCE), when Adab was a provincial city of the Akkad empire. It records a large quantity of barley, over 45 gur or roughly 13,500 litres, measured all the way down to fractions of a litre. It also notes a rate of 15 sila per gur and marks the grain as set aside or outstanding in connection with porters or labourers. It shows how finely Akkadian-era bookkeepers tracked grain destined for work gangs.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The account concerns a total of 45 gur, 2 barig, 3 ban, 3 sila and 15 shekels of barley, a very precisely measured amount of grain. It sets a rate of 15 sila for each gur, though the rest of that line is broken. The barley is recorded as set aside, held outside the regular stock. It relates to the porters, the labourers who carried loads.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine45 gur, 2 barig(?), 3 ban(?), 3 sila, 15 shekels of barley; per gur [...] 15 sila [...] (this barley) is set aside (lit. 'is placed outside'), (for / of) the porters.
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
4(u) 5(asz) 2(barig)? 3(ban2)? 3(disz)# sila3# 1(u) 5(disz) gin2 sze gur-[ta] 1(ban2@c) 5(disz) sila3 [...] bar-ra gal2-la ug3-IL2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0968. 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 (P217596) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.