Position in chronology
HSS 10, 039
About this tablet
An agricultural account from Gasur (later Nuzi, in northern Iraq) in the Old Akkadian period, around 2300 BCE. It records plots of farmland together with the amounts of seed barley assigned for sowing them, listed under two named men — Enbu-ilum, identified by his brother's name, and Šu-Bela, who has the second allotment 'in hand.' Tablets like this show how a central administration tracked land and the seed grain issued to work it, centuries before the town became famous as Hurrian Nuzi.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Field of 2 eše and 2½ iku (roughly 5 hectares): 3 gur of seed barley, minus 3 ban, issued to Enbu-ilum, brother of Tulili. A second field of about 1 bur (the figure is partly broken): 1 gur and 3 barig of seed barley, barley put out for sowing, in the charge of Šu-Bela. In short, a bookkeeper's note of two parcels of land and the exact quantities of seed grain handed to the two men responsible for planting them.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 2(eše₃) 2(iku) ½(iku) of field (area), 2. 3 gur less 3 ban of seed barley — 3. (for) Enbu-ilum, 4. brother of Tulili. 5. 1(bur₃)? [...] of field (area), 1 gur 3 barig of seed barley — 6. barley ... (šu-kad₅) scattered(?) (i.e., sown/allotted), 7. (in the) hand of Šu-Bela.
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
2(esze3@c) 2(iku@c) 1/2(iku@c) _GAN2_ 3(asz@c) _la2_ 3(ban2@c) _sze-numun gur_ en-bu-dingir szesz tu-li-li 1(bur3)#? [...] _GAN2_ 1(asz@c) 3(barig@c) _sze-numun [gur_] _sze |SZU.KAD5| ri-a_ szu szu-be-la
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 039. 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 (P213305) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.