Position in chronology
AO 00286
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet of the Akkadian (Sargonic) period, now in the Louvre, recording measured quantities of different grades of flour and of barley destined for soup. The final line marks these as 'regular offerings' — the routine, scheduled provisioning of a temple or household. It is the everyday accounting of an institutional kitchen more than four thousand years ago, showing that Mesopotamian bookkeepers distinguished carefully between coarse semolina, fine flour, bread flour, and other milling grades.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
An issue slip from the storeroom: 30 liters of coarse semolina flour, 30 liters of fine flour, 20 liters of flour for first-quality bread, 30 liters of zatum-flour, and 30 liters of barley for making soup. A further note concerns zikum-flour on hand. All of it is booked as the regular, recurring offering deliveries — the standing order that the kitchen filled on schedule.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 3 ban (of) dabin-flour, 2. 3 ban (of) fine flour, 3. 2 ban (of) flour for first-quality (sag-)bread, 4. 3 ban (of) zatum-flour, 5. 3 ban (of) barley for soup, 6. ... there is (in stock?) zikum-flour; 7. (as) regular offerings.
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
3(ban2@c) dabin 3(ban2@c) zi3-gu 2(ban2@c) zi3 sag-ninda 3(ban2@c) zi3 za-tum 3(ban2@c) sze tu7 IM?-gal2 zi3 zi-kum sa2-du11
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — AO 00286. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P491783) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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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.