Position in chronology
HSS 10, 050
About this tablet
A badly damaged accounting tablet from Gasur (later Nuzi, in northern Iraq) from the Old Akkadian period, roughly 2300–2200 BCE. It belongs to the archive of grain and flour accounts kept by the town's administrators, recording quantities of barley and coarse flour and noting an outstanding balance charged to a named individual. Even in its broken state it shows the bookkeeping machinery of one of the earliest territorial empires operating far from its capital.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Most of this account is lost: the opening entry recorded some amount of barley measured in gur, but the next seven lines are too broken to read beyond a stray sign or two. Where the text becomes legible again, it records another quantity in gur belonging to the grain store, then 2 gur (roughly 600 liters) of coarse barley flour. The closing note states that the remaining balance is charged to a man named Uḫluk — he still owes it to the administration.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [...] barley, [in gur] 2. [...] 3. [...] ... [...] 4. [...] 5. [...]-e 6. [...] 7. [...] ... 8. [...] ... 9. [...] gur 10. of the grain-store (kārûm) 11. 2 gur of dabin-flour, 12. the remainder (šittum), 13. (charged) upon Uḫluk.
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
[...] _sze [gur_] [...] [...] x [...] [...] [...]-e [...] [...] x [...] x [...] _gur#_ ka3-ri2 2(asz@c) _dabin gur_ si-tum al uh-lu-uk
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 050. 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 (P213316) — 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.