Position in chronology
HSS 10, 074
About this tablet
A small grain-accounting tablet from Gasur (the later Nuzi, in northern Iraq) from the Old Akkadian period, around 2300 BCE. It records measured amounts of three cereals — barley, emmer, and wheat — apparently received by or issued to a farmer. Tablets like this are the routine bookkeeping of an early provincial economy, and the Gasur archive is one of the oldest documented from this site.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a grain receipt. It lists roughly one and a quarter gur of barley, a little over a gur of emmer, and about two-thirds of a gur of wheat. A farmer, whose name is lost in the damage, apparently received these amounts. A further entry of about four gur of some commodity follows, but the last lines are too broken to read, and the rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 1 gur 1 barig of barley, 2. 1 gur 3 ban of emmer, 3. 3 barig 3 ban of wheat, 4. [...] the farmer [...] 5. rec[eived(?)]. 6. 4(?) [gur ...] 7. ... [...] (remainder broken)
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(asz@c) 1(barig@c) _sze gur#_ 1(asz@c) 3(ban2@c) _ziz2 gur_ 3(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) _gig [gur_] [...] _engar_ [...] im-[hur?] 4(asz@c)#? [... _gur_] x x [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 074. 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 (P213340) — 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.