Position in chronology
AuOr 09, 148 1
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged administrative tablet from Umma in southern Iraq, written under the Akkadian (Sargonic) kings a little before 2200 BCE. What survives records a field, seed grain, two days of labour, some timber, and a man attached to a leather- or gate-work assignment, all booked as a delivery and signed off by a scribe, with a year-and-month date at the end. It is ordinary estate bookkeeping — the kind of note that kept a provincial agricultural household in balance — now too broken to say whose field or whose account it is. Its interest lies less in the content than in the fact that such routine paperwork was already being dated by regnal year and archived.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surface is badly worn, but the entries that survive read like a work-and-supply ledger: a plot of land, seed grain set aside for storage, two days of labour credited, some timber, and a named man assigned to processing work. Two further lines are destroyed. The account closes the way such records normally do — logged to the scribe, marked as a delivery received, and dated to the seventh year, with the month name now lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [......] iku field(?) (GAN₂) 2. seed, to be deposited(?) 3. labour: 2 days 4. ... wood/timber, PAP-[......] 5. [......] the man (of the) du₈(-work) 6. [......] ... ... [......] 7. [......] ... ... [......] 8. [for/by the sc]ribe 9. delivery (mu-kux(DU)) 10. [......] year 7, month(s)
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
[...] GAN2 numun# ga2-ra a2# 2(disz) u4# x gesz PAP#-[...] [...] lu2# du8# [...] x x [...] [...] x x [...] [dub]-sar#-e# mu#-kux(DU) [...] mu# 7(disz@t) iti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — AuOr 09, 148 1. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Montserrat Museum, Barcelona, Spain (P212571) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.