Position in chronology
Adab 0988
About this tablet
A small clay memorandum from Adab in southern Iraq, written under the Akkadian (Sargonic) kings, roughly 2300 BCE. Instead of the usual column of quantities, it reads like a short incident report: during the month of Ninmug's festival, grain in store was found spoiled, a quantity of barley was written off, and a man named Ama-ga sealed up an opening in the wall — which was opened again on the seventh day. Day-by-day narrative notes like this are rare in Mesopotamian accounting, and this one gives an unusually direct glimpse of a scribe recording a problem in a storehouse as it unfolded.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Dated to the month of the Ninmug festival. Report: by the end of the sixth day the grain had gone bad. The barley held in the GI×U store was written off the books as a loss; it was ruined. Ama-ga then closed up the opening in the wall. On the seventh day it was opened again.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineMonth: “Festival-of-Ninmug.” Until the 6th day had elapsed — the grain: its spoilage was present; the barley of the GI×U(-store) was booked out (as expenditure); it perished. (reverse) Ama-ga bound up the opening of the wall. On the 7th day the day(?) was released (i.e. it was opened again).
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
iti ezem-nin-mug u4 6(disz@t) zal-la-asz sze12 hul-bi i3-gal2-am3 sze |GIxU| zi-ga ib2-usz2 ama-ga bad3 ka ib2-kesz2-am3 u4 7(disz@t)-kam-ma-ka u4 ba-bur2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 0988. 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 (P217606) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.