Position in chronology
Adab 0972
About this tablet
This is a small receipt from the Sargonic period (about 2300–2150 BCE), from the Sumerian city of Adab in central Iraq. It records how an office handed out a legume, probably chickpeas or a large bean, to a few named people, one of them a scribe. The scribe added up the portions, wrote the total, and marked the whole thing as an expenditure. It shows the careful, everyday bookkeeping of an Akkadian-era provincial administration.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Chickpeas paid out: Ur-Ištaran, the rider, received 105 sila (about 105 liters) of large chickpeas. Lugal-mah received 30 sila. Lugal-itida the scribe and Ur-nigar received 20 sila. In all, 155 sila of large chickpeas left the stores, and the tablet books it as an expenditure.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1 barig 4 ban 5 sila (= 105 sila) of [large] chickpeas: Ur-Ištaran, the lu-u5 (rider?); 3 ban (= 30 sila): Lugal-mah; 2 ban (= 20 sila): Lugal-itida, Reverse the scribe, and Ur-nigar. (blank space) Total: 2 barig 3 ban 5 sila (= 155 sila) of large chickpeas. It is an expenditure.
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
1(barig) 4(ban2) 5(disz) sila3 gu2-gu2 [gal] ur-isztaran lu2-u5 3(ban2@c) lugal-mah2 2(ban2@c) lugal-iti-da dub-sar u3 ur-nigar szunigin 2(barig) 3(ban2) 5(disz) sila3 gu2-gu2 gal# zi-ga-am3#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0972. 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 (P217598) — 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.