Position in chronology
Adab 1007
About this tablet
A small Old Akkadian account tablet from Adab in southern Iraq, roughly 2300–2150 BCE, written by a local administrator. It logs disbursements of bread and beer to named military commanders (šagina, 'general'), followed by a short list of other goods — bundles of flax and cress, and a mention of gold. Tablets like this are the routine bookkeeping of an Akkadian-period provincial center, showing how the state fed its officers with a fixed ration of loaves and beer while tracking other valuables in the same ledger. The piece is badly chipped, so several entries and the whole reverse survive only in fragments.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening entries are lost. What remains lists beer issued to An-gu, a general; then one da-bulug loaf and two measures of beer for a second general whose name begins x-en-. A third officer receives loaves and beer in amounts now broken away. The account then shifts to other goods: one load of flax, three bundles of flax and one bundle of cress, and — in a damaged line — a mention of a building, something read only as KU, and gold. The last line probably names the person who delivered the lot. The reverse and the inscribed edges are too worn to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] [...] beer; An-gu, the general (šagina). 1 da-bulug bread, 2 (measures of) beer: x-en-[...], the general(?). [...] da-[bulug] bread, [...] beer; geš-nim [...] ... 1 load (gu₂) of flax, not [...]-split(?), 3 bundles of flax(?), 1 bundle of cress (še-lu₂), [...]-house(?), KU, gold, [...]-tum₂ (delivered/brought?). (The tablet is broken at the beginning and along the lower obverse; the reverse and the inscribed edges are largely effaced and cannot be read line by line.)
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
[...] [...] kasz an-gu2 szagina 1(asz@c) da-bulug4 ninda 2(asz@c) kasz x-en-[...] szagina# [...] da#-[bulug4] ninda [...] kasz gesz#?-nim [...] x 1(asz@c) gu2 lu nu-[...]-dar? 3(asz@c) sa lu? 1(asz@c) sa sze-lu2 [...]-e2 KU ku3-sig17 [...]-tum2#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 1007. 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 (P217611) — 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.