Position in chronology
BIN 08, 223
About this tablet
A short grain account from Mesopotamia in the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, around 2300–2150 BCE. It lists amounts of barley, measured by the large 'great gur' measure, next to three people. Two of them are both named Gešša and are told apart by their jobs: one is an overseer and the other is a gala, a lamentation priest or cult singer. The tablet does not say whether the barley was paid out, delivered or owed. Tiny records like this one show how the Akkadian state and temple economies kept track of grain for each person.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley account: Gešša the overseer, 14 large gur of barley. Allu, 11 gur. Gešša the lamentation priest, 7 gur, 2 barig and 2 ban. The note does not say whether this grain was handed out, delivered or owed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse (?) 1. 14 gur of barley, (by the) great gur (gur sag-gal2), 2. Gešša, the overseer; 3. 11 gur of barley, 4. Allu(!); 5. 7 gur 2 barig 2 ban of barley, 6. Gešša, the lamentation priest (gala).
Our translation engine — Opus 5.5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(u@c) 4(asz@c) sze gur sag-gal2 gesz-sza3 ugula 1(u@c) 1(asz@c) sze gur al-lu2!* 7(asz@c) 2(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) sze gur# gesz-sza3 gala
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — BIN 08, 223. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Nies Babylonian Collection, Yale Babylonian Collection, New Haven, Connecticut, USA (P212767) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (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.