Position in chronology
Anonymous 270825
About this tablet
A small personnel roster from the Akkadian period (about 2300 BCE), probably from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. A scribe counted off seven workers by name — six men and one woman — and noted the overseer under whose authority they stood. Lists like this were the everyday bookkeeping of labor gangs: who was on the roll, and who answered for them. The woman's presence, explicitly marked, is a small reminder that women worked in these state-managed crews alongside men.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a head-count of seven workers, one tally mark each: Kar-dug, Guza, Lulum, Ur-tur, the woman A-nu-dul, Utu-ursag, and a seventh man whose name is partly illegible, something ending in '-uri'. The final lines note that they belong to — or were taken from — the charge of a named foreman, whose own name is too damaged to read: 'from So-and-so, the overseer.' The back of the tablet was left blank; the accounting fit on the front.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 1 (man): Kar-dug 2. 1 (man): Guza(?) 3. 1 (man): Lulum(?) 4. 1 (man): Ur-tur(?) 5. 1 woman: A-nu-dul 6. 1 (man): Utu-ursag 7. 1 (man): [...]-uri 8. from ...-..., 9. the overseer.
Our translation engine — Fable 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
1(asz@c) kar-du10 1(asz@c) gu#?-za#? 1(asz@c) lu2#?-lum 1(asz@c) ur#?-tur 1(asz@c) MUNUS a2-nu-dul3 1(asz@c) utu-ur-sag 1(asz@c) x-uri x x-x-ta ugula
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Anonymous 270825. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: private: anonymous, unlocated (P270825) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-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.