Position in chronology
HSS 10, 046
About this tablet
A short accounting note from Gasur (the older name of Nuzi, in northeastern Iraq) from the Old Akkadian period, roughly 2300–2200 BCE. It records an outstanding balance — a shortfall of about 35 gur of barley, reckoned down to a third of a liter — and states that the grain in question is on hand at the kārum, the town's quay or trading depot. Tablets like this are the working ledger slips of one of the earliest documented commercial hubs in Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Shortfall on the books: 35 gur, 2 barig, 1 ban, and 4⅓ sila of barley — a precisely reckoned deficit of grain. The note adds that this belongs to a particular barley account (the qualifying phrase is obscure to us), and that the amount is present at the harbor depot, the kārum. In modern terms: 'Outstanding balance of roughly 10,600 liters of barley; the stock is sitting at the trading quay.'
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. Deficit: 35 gur, 2 barig, 1 ban, 4 1/3(?) sila of barley, 2. (this is) of the barley ... (ŠU.KAD₅) ... (RI); 3. at the quay (kārum) 4. it is (available).
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
_la2-ia3_ 3(u@c) 5(asz@c) 2(barig@c) 1(ban2@c) 4(disz) 1/3(disz)#? _sila3 sze gur_ szu _sze |SZU.KAD5| ri_ al ka3-ri2 i-ba-szi4
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 046. 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 (P213312) — 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.