Position in chronology
Adab 1057
About this tablet
A small Old Akkadian account from Adab, in southern Iraq, recording tiny quantities of milled grain handed out for a ritual occasion — an offering of sprinkled flour and a single litre each of coarse flour and groats, issued when the plough was unyoked. The disbursement is booked as an expenditure under a cook named Sipa-ane, and dated to the month Duku. Texts like this show how the great agricultural moments of the year were marked with small food offerings, and how carefully even a litre of flour was written down by the institution's scribes.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening lines, now broken, listed flour and an allotment of flour for sprinkling, together with a man named Igi-zi. Then: one litre of coarse flour and one litre of groats, issued for the occasion when the plough was released from work. The total is entered as an outlay, charged to Sipa-ane the cook, in the month of Duku.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] flour (dabin) [... ] flour-for-sprinkling (zi3-dub-dub) Igi-zi 1 sila of flour (dabin) 1 sila of groats (nig2-[ar3-ra]) — when the plough was released — expenditure. Sipa-ane, the cook. Month: Duku.
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
[...] dabin [... zi3]-dub-dub igi-zi 1(disz) sila3 dabin 1(disz) sila3 nig2-[ar3-ra] apin-na bi2-duh-ha-a zi-ga sipa#-an-ne2 muhaldim iti# du6-ku3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Adab 1057. 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 (P217622) — 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.