Position in chronology
HSS 10, 022
About this tablet
A small administrative account from Gasur, the town in northern Iraq that would later become Nuzi, written under the Akkadian empire around 2300 BCE. It tallies large quantities — 72 and 50½ units of some commodity or land — against a measured field area, and names an individual, Bukašum, presumably the holder or cultivator of the plot. Tablets like this belong to one of the earliest administrative archives known from the Akkadian provinces, showing imperial-style bookkeeping of fields and yields far from the capital.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary ledger entry. Two big figures head the account: seventy-two and a half of something (the item's name is partly lost, marked 'highland'?) and fifty and a half of another item, each annotated with a checking note meaning the amounts tally or balance. Then comes the land involved: 'its field area: so-many iku' — the number is broken away. The plot is tied to a man named Bukašum, and a final line begins another field entry before the text breaks off.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 72(?) [...] (and) ½, highland(?) (kur), equalized/checked (i₃-sa₂); 2. 50 (and) ½, u₅(?), equalized/checked (i₃-sa₂); 3. its field-area: [...] iku (GAN₂); 4. (of) Bukašum; 5. field ... [...]
Our translation engine — Fable 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) 1(u@c) 2(asz@c)#? [...] 1/2(asz@c) kur i3-sa2 5(u@c) 1/2(asz@c) u5# i3-sa2 a-sza3-bi [...] GAN2# bu-ka3-szum# GAN2# x [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 022. 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 (P213288) — 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.