Position in chronology
CST 020
About this tablet
This is a short grain account from the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, roughly 2300–2150 BCE. Its origin is unknown, and it is now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. It records large amounts of barley measured in gur, a unit of roughly 300 litres. The barley is linked to a man called Adda, to an 'ox-house' belonging to someone named Meme, and to two men, Ur-še and Ur-niĝ. The last line calls the grain 'on hand', so this looks like a record of stored barley rather than grain paid out. It gives a glimpse of how large supplies of grain were tracked and assigned to named people.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Grain on hand: 80 gur of barley, listed under Adda and associated with Meme's ox-house. Ur-še is down for 42 gur and Ur-niĝ for 30 gur, and the tablet then notes that this is Ur-še's barley. It ends with a note that is hard to interpret ('ma-buru4') and closes by stating that the barley is available, in stock.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse (and continuation; no side markers in the source) 1. 80 gur of barley: 2. Adda; 3. (at/from) the ox-house (?) of Meme. 4. 42 (gur): Ur-še; 5. 30 (gur): Ur-niĝ; 6. it is the barley of Ur-še. 7. ma-buru4 (meaning unclear); 8. barley that is on hand.
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
1(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) sze gur ad-da e2 gu4!? me-me KI 4(u@c) 2(asz@c) ur-sze3 3(u@c) ur-nig2 sze ur-sze3-kam ma-buru4 sze gal2-la
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — CST 020. 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 (P212944) — 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.