Position in chronology
BuB 2, 06
About this tablet
This is a small receipt or account from Umma in southern Iraq, from the time of the Akkadian empire (about 2300–2200 BCE). It records six jars of beer set aside as an extra 'nesag' offering. Nesag was a first-fruits offering made to the gods. The scribe then states how much barley the beer is worth and dates the entry to the day. It is a plain piece of temple and estate bookkeeping, showing that offerings of beer were counted in barley, the basic unit of value in the Sumerian economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Six jars of beer, each holding 5 ban, have been provided as an extra first-fruits (nesag) offering. Altogether this comes to 1 gur and 1 barig of barley for the beer, measured by the standard gur. Dated year 7, month 2, day 9.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse(?) 1. 6 (jars of) beer, (each) jar (of) 5 ban, 2. additional nesag offering. 3. Total: 1 gur 1 barig of barley (for) beer, in the gur sag-gal (standard gur). 4. Year 7, month 2, day 10 minus 1 (= day 9).
Our translation engine — Opus 5.5. 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
6(asz@c) kasz 5(ban2) dug ne-sag diri szunigin 1(asz@c) 1(barig@c) sze kasz gur sag-gal2 7(disz@t) mu 2(disz@t) itix(|UD@sxTIL|) 1(u) la2 1(disz@t) u4
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — BuB 2, 06. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation (P214926) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (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.