Position in chronology
Adab 0985
About this tablet
A small clay receipt from Adab in southern Iraq, written during the Akkadian (Sargonic) period, roughly 2300–2150 BCE. It lists modest amounts of two grades of barley flour, some barley, and a jar of beer, each parcel tied to a named person or office — the sort of daily disbursement a household or temple steward jotted down and filed. The mention of an "Agade" measure for the first entry is striking: it points to the imperial capital's standard of measurement reaching a provincial town's kitchen accounts. The lower right of the tablet is chipped away, so one or two entries are lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Flour and drink issued: six litres of coarse flour by the Agade measure, three litres of fine flour, two more litres of coarse flour, one litre of barley (the rest of that entry is broken), and six and two-thirds litres of something no longer readable. The next entries are charged to named parties — Ka-en-en-ne (?) and Igi-zi. The back of the tablet records one vessel of beer holding three ban, under the name Ki-Utu. In modern terms, a short stores ledger: grain and beer out, with who took what.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine6 sila of dabin-flour, Agade (measure); 3 sila of gu-flour; 2 sila of dabin-flour; 1 sila of barley-[...]; 6 2/3 sila of [...]; Ka-en-en-ne (?); Igi-zi; 1 (vessel of) beer, 3 ban; Ki-Utu.
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
6(disz) sila3 dabin a-ga-de3 3(disz) sila3 zi3-gu 2(disz) sila3 zi3 dabin 1(disz) sila3 sze-[...] 6(disz) 2/3(disz) sila3 x [...] ka2?-en-en-ne igi-zi 1(asz@c) kasz 3(ban2@c) ki-utu
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0985. 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 (P217605) — 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.