Position in chronology
Adab 1015
About this tablet
A small clay accounting note from Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), written during the Akkadian empire, roughly 2300–2150 BCE. It records a batch of 864 bread loaves, the flour that went into them, and a further measure of barley, all issued to a body of elite personnel and to ordinary soldiers, with the whole amount booked as an expenditure under an official named En-anna-tum in a particular month. The detail that catches the eye is the phrase 'gur of Agade': grain here is reckoned by the capacity standard of the imperial capital, a small sign of how far the measuring norms of Sargon's dynasty reached into provincial temple and palace kitchens.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Eight hundred sixty-four loaves of bread, together with the flour they were milled from — just under a full gur, measured on the Agade standard — plus a further quantity of barley, a little over a unit and a half sila of the ḪI×DIŠ grade. All of it went to the select troops and to the regular soldiers. Entered in the books as barley paid out, under the authority of En-anna-tum, in the month of Šu-gar.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine864 bread(-loaves); its flour: 1 less 1, 1 [+ n sila], by the gur-measure of Agade; 1, ½ sila of ḪI×DIŠ barley — (for) the select ones (nisqū) and the soldier[s]. Barley expend[ed]. En-anna-tum. Month: Šu-[gar].
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
1(gesz'u) 4(gesz2) 2(u) 4(disz) ninda dabin#-bi 1(asz) la2 1(asz@c) 1(disz) [n sila3] gur# a-ga-de3[] 1(asz@c) 1/2(disz) sila3 sze |HIxDISZ| ni-is-qu2 u3 aga3-[us2] sze zi-[ga] en-an-na-tum2# iti szu-[gar]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 1015. 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 (P217617) — 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.