Position in chronology
HSS 10, 042
About this tablet
A receipt from Gasur (later Nuzi, in northern Iraq) during the Old Akkadian period, roughly 2300 BCE — the everyday paperwork of grain moving between hands. An official named Er'e-Utu acknowledges receiving a little over thirteen gur of barley (several thousand liters) from three named individuals, two of whom are identified as merchants, at a place called Maškan-gal. Tablets like this from Gasur are among our earliest windows into commerce and grain accounting in the towns east of the Tigris, centuries before the famous Nuzi archives were written at the same site.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: 13 gur, 2 barig, and 3 ban of barley — barley from the bundled(?) consignment — was handed over by Sirni, Galili, and Atie, the two of them merchants. Er'e-Utu took delivery of it at Maškan-gal, and the grain was measured out in full. In modern terms: a warehouse receipt confirming that a large barley shipment from a group of traders was received and verified by measure at a collection point.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 13 gur, 2 barig, 3 ban of barley, 2. barley of the šu-KAD5 ... allotment(?), 3. from 4. Sirni, 5. Galili, 6. and Atie, 7. the two merchants, 8. in Maškan-gal 9. he received — 10. Er'e-Utu (received it); 11. it was measured out.
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(u@c) 3(asz@c) 2(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) _sze gur_ szu _sze |SZU.KAD5| ri-a_ isz-te4 si-ir-ni ga-li-li u3 a-ti-e 2(asz@c) _dam-gar3_ in masz-kan2-gal im-hu-ra er3-e-utu _e-ag2_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 042. 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 (P213308) — 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.