Position in chronology
CST 018
About this tablet
This is a land register from the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, about 2300–2150 BCE. It lists five large blocks of arable land, each placed in a named irrigated district. The tablet then adds them up to a total of about 660 hectares, recorded as land "taken over" in connection with a man named Eṭib-mer. Sargonic administrators kept records like this to track big estates, which were often granted to or managed by officials of the Akkadian state. The scribe's total is correct, so we can check his arithmetic against the entries.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Land statement: 30 bur of field in the Amar-uga district, 30 bur in the Edin-hu…-gid district (part of that name is damaged), 12 bur in Amer-zatur, 10 bur in Barbara and 20 bur in Dapeš. That comes to 102 bur in all, roughly 660 hectares. All of this field was taken over by (or assigned to) Eṭib-mer.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse / continuous text; no side markers in the source) 1. 3 bur'u (= 30 bur) of field, 2. meadow-district of Amar-uga; 3. 3 bur'u (= 30 bur), PAP field, 4. meadow-district of Edin-hu?-[...]-gid?; 5. 1 bur'u 2 bur (= 12 bur), PAP field, 6. meadow-district of Amer-zatur; 7. 1 bur'u (= 10 bur), PAP field, 8. meadow-district of Barbara; 9. 2 bur'u (= 20 bur), PAP field, 10. meadow-district of Dapeš. 11. Total: 1 šar 4 bur'u 2 bur (= 102 bur) of field: 12. field taken over (dab5-ba) 13. (by) Eṭib-mer.
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
3(bur'u@c) GAN2 agar4 amar-u2-ga 3(bur'u@c) PAP GAN2 agar4 edin-hu#?-[...]-gid2#? 1(bur'u@c) 2(bur3@c) PAP GAN2 agar4 a-mer-za-tur3 1(bur'u@c) PAP GAN2 agar4 bar-bar-ra 2(bur'u@c) pap GAN2 agar4 da-pesz3 szunigin 1(szar2@c) 4(bur'u@c) 2(bur3@c) GAN2 a-sza3 dab5-ba e3-t,ib-me-er
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — CST 018. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK (P212942) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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