Position in chronology
AO 31359
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from the Old Akkadian period (roughly 2300–2150 BCE), listing men by name, one unit or ration each, and then totalling them as twelve able-bodied workers who are identified as soldiers in royal service. Texts like this are the muster rolls and ration slips of early Mesopotamian state administration: the scribe cares less about who these men were as individuals than about how many of them the crown had to feed. The names are ordinary ones — Dada, Lu-Utu, Ur-Abu — and the closing line, partly unclear, may record a goat or an accounting notation.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
One each is booked for Udu-[...], Lugal-[...], Dada, Ur-e, Lu-Utu, Ur-Abu, Ur-dumu, and [Ur?]-e. The total comes to twelve men, all of them soldiers in the king's service. A final line, damaged, adds something about im-sag and possibly a goat. Only eight names survive against a stated total of twelve, so part of the roster is lost or stood elsewhere on the tablet.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 1 (unit): Udu-[......] 2. 1 (unit): Lugal-[x x?] 3. 1 (unit): Da-da 4. 1 (unit): Ur-e 5. 1 (unit): Lu-Utu 6. 1 (unit): Ur-Abu 7. 1 (unit): Ur-dumu 8. [1 (unit): Ur?]-e 9. Total: 12 able-bodied men, 10. they are royal soldiers (aga-us). 11. ... im-sag, goat(?)
Our translation engine — Opus 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) udu [...] 1(asz@c) lugal-[x x?] 1(asz@c) da-da# 1(asz@c) ur-e2# 1(asz@c) lu2-utu 1(asz@c) ur-ab-u2 1(asz@c) ur-dumu [1(asz@c) ur?]-e11# szunigin# 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) gurusz aga3#-us2 lugal-me x im-sag# masz?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — AO 31359. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P494583) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.