Position in chronology
CUSAS 26, 243
About this tablet
This is a bookkeeping record from Ur, written in the Old Akkadian period (around 2300–2150 BCE) when the kings of Akkad ruled southern Mesopotamia. It notes how much coarse barley flour was handed over to be baked into bread, and who signed for each batch. Each entry names the recipient and ends with the Sumerian phrase for "received", like a line on a delivery docket. The tablet is fragmentary: most personal names and some amounts are lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The record opens partway through an entry: someone whose name ends in "-ri" has signed for a delivery. Next, one gur of coarse barley flour went to be baked into bread, and someone whose name ends in "-daka" signed for it. Another batch of flour, amount lost, was also baked into bread and signed for by a person whose name is partly readable as "...-lumlum". A final entry of flour starts with an amount that includes 2 barig, but the text stops there and the rest of the entry is missing.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...]-ri received. 1 gur of dabin-flour, baked into bread: [...]-da-ka [...] received. [n (gur of)] dabin-flour, baked into [bread]: x-lum-lum [...] received. [(n gur)] 2 barig of dabin-flour, ...
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
ri szu# ba#-ti# 1(asz@c) dabin gur ninda-a ba-du8 [x (x)]-da-ka [x (x)] szu ba-ti [n] dabin# gur [ninda]-a ba-du8 x-lum-lum [(x)] x szu ba-ti [(n)] 2(barig@c) dabin gur
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC) ?) — CUSAS 26, 243. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P467768) — 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.