Position in chronology
HSS 10, 062
About this tablet
A short administrative account from Gasur (the later Nuzi, in northeastern Iraq) dating to the Old Akkadian period, around 2300 BCE. It records substantial quantities of barley, coarse flour, and malt — the last an ingredient for brewing beer — associated with a named individual and booked under the authority or account of a man called Kurma. Tablets like this belong to one of the earliest known provincial archives of the Akkadian empire, showing how grain moved through local storehouses far from the capital.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a grain ledger entry: roughly 43 gur of barley (a very large amount, well over ten thousand liters), plus a smaller quantity of dabin — a coarse barley flour — of which the gur figure is broken away but 3 ban and 6 sila survive, and 1 ban of malt for brewing. The goods are entered under a person whose name is partly lost (it ends in “-la-i-kizih”), charged to the account of Kurma, and the transaction took place at Gasur. The rest of the details, including the flour’s full total, are lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 43 gur 3 barig 3 ban 7 sila of [barley], 2. [...] gur 3 ban(?) 6 sila of dabin-flour, 3. 1 ban of malt: 4. [...]-la-i-kizih; 5. that of Kurma, 6. in Gasur.
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
_4(u@c) 3(asz@c) 3(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) 7(disz) sila3# [sze] gur_ _[...] 3(ban2@c)#? 6(disz@t) sila3 dabin gur_ _1(ban2@c)# munu4#_ [...]-la-i-ki-zi-ih szu ku-ur#-ma# in ga-sur2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 062. 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 (P213328) — 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.