Position in chronology
HSS 10, 061
About this tablet
An administrative account from Gasur — the town later known as Nuzi, in northern Iraq — written in the Old Akkadian period, roughly 2300 BCE. It records quantities of barley and of large and small pulses (legumes such as broad beans or chickpeas and lentils), each entry tied to a named individual, including a man called Zariqum. It is the everyday bookkeeping of an early provincial storehouse: who received or delivered how much staple food. Tablets like this from Gasur are among our best evidence for daily economic life in the Akkadian empire's eastern reaches.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary ledger of foodstuffs. One entry logs 2 gur of barley (a gur is roughly 300 liters) against a person whose name is broken off, ending in "-la." Then come 2 gur of large pulses and 2 gur 210 liters — written as "3 gur minus 3 ban" — of small pulses, booked to someone whose name ends in "-ḫir." After a damaged line, another 3 ban (about 30 liters) of large pulses is entered for a person whose name ends in "-bu-bu." The last legible entries name Zariqum and one more person whose name is mostly lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [... x] 2 gur of barley 2. [(to/from) PN ...]-la 3. 2 gur of large pulses 4. 3 gur less 3 ban of small pulses 5. [(to/from) PN ...]-ḫir 6. [...] ... 7. [...] 3 ban of large pulses 8. [(to/from) PN ...]-bu?-bu 9. [...] Zariqum 10. [...]...-zum
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
[... x] 2(asz@c) _sze gur_ [...]-la 2(asz@c) _gu2-gu2 gal-gal gur_ 3(asz@c) _la2_ 3(ban2@c) _gu2-gu2 tur-tur gur_ [...]-hi#-ir [...] x [...] 3(ban2@c) _gu2-gu2 gal-gal# gur_ [...]-bu#?-bu [...] za#-ri2-qum [...] x-zum
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 061. 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 (P213327) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
Related tablets
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.