Position in chronology
Anonymous 271236
About this tablet
A short inventory from the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, around 2300 BCE, probably drawn up at or near Umma in southern Iraq. A storehouse clerk counts up carpentry stock and containers — baskets, 38 chair legs, 35 grinding implements, animal horns, and wooden pieces for chair frames — and certifies that they are physically present at Zabalam, a neighboring cult city. It is a snapshot of a furniture workshop's raw materials: the kind of routine stock-check that kept a Mesopotamian institutional economy honest.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Stock on hand at Zabalam: one basket of first-grade(?) male items, thirty-eight chair legs, thirty-five wooden grinders, three more baskets, a batch of small horns plus one large horn, five wooden beams with branches, and five wooden crosspieces for chairs. All of the above verified as present in storage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. 1 gurdub-basket, male head(s) (sag-nita), front/breast(?), 2. 40 minus 2 (= 38) chair legs, 3. 35 wooden grinding implements, 4. 3 gurdub-baskets, TU(?), 5. n small horns, 1 large horn, 6. 5 gur-beams(?) with branches(?), 7. 5 gur-beams(?), chair crosspieces (dub-la), 8. (in/of) Zabalam — 9. they are on hand.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(asz@c) gurdub2 sag-nita gaba#? 4(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) ur2 gu-za 3(u@c) 5(asz@c) gesz-ar3 3(asz@c) gurdub TU n si tur 1(asz@c) si gal 5(disz) gur8 pa 5(disz) gur8 dub-la gu-za zabala5 i3#-gal2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Anonymous 271236. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: private: anonymous, unlocated (P271236) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-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.