Position in chronology
HSS 10, 017
About this tablet
A field-and-seed account from Gasur (the later Nuzi, in northern Iraq) during the Old Akkadian period, roughly 2300 BCE. It records a large parcel of farmland — about 20 acres in the first entry — together with the amount of barley seed needed to sow it, credited to a named overseer. Tablets like this show the Akkadian state's agricultural bookkeeping reaching far into the provinces: land was surveyed, seed rationed by standard rates, and responsibility pinned to individual officials.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
First entry: a field of 1 bur, 2 eše, and 3¼ iku (roughly 8 hectares), requiring 6 gur, 3 barig, 1 ban, and 5 sila of seed grain — assigned to ARAD2-suni, the overseer. A second entry follows: a smaller field of 1 eše and 3 iku, but the details of its seed allotment and the person responsible are broken away; the last legible line preserves only the name or designation GAN-UN.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 1 bur3 2 eše3 3 1/4 iku of field, 2. its seed grain: 6 gur 3 barig 1 ban2 5 sila — 3. ARAD2-suni, 4. the overseer. 5. 1 eše3 3 iku [...] of field, 6. [......] 7. [......] 8. GAN-UN.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(bur3@c) 2(esze3@c) 3(iku@c) 1/4(iku@c) _GAN2_ _sze-numun_-su 6(asz@c) 3(barig@c) 1(ban2@c) 5(disz@t) _sila3 gur_ ARAD2-su2-ni _nu-banda3_ 1(esze3@c) 3(iku@c) [...] _GAN2_ [...] [...] GAN-UN
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 017. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (P213283) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.