Position in chronology
HSS 10, 075
About this tablet
A grain-issue record from Gasur (the later Nuzi, in northern Iraq) in the Old Akkadian period, around 2300 BCE. It documents a man named Išma-ilum receiving a substantial quantity of emmer wheat to use as seed grain, in at least two separate installments. Texts like this show how a central administration provisioned farmers for the planting season — seed corn was advanced from institutional stores and its recipients carefully tracked. The tablet belongs to the earliest archive ever recovered from this site, centuries before Nuzi's famous later archives.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Išma-ilum has received 7 gur, 3 barig, and 4 ban of emmer wheat (roughly 2,200 liters) as seed grain for planting. That was his first installment. He then received a second installment of emmer — the amount is lost in a break — again recorded under his name. In modern terms: a receipt logging two successive advances of seed wheat to the same farmer from the granary's stock.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 7 gur 3 barig 4 ban of emmer wheat, 2. for seed, 3. Išma-ilum 4. received. 5. [(This was) the 1st] time. 6. [...] gur 7. — the 2nd time — 8. Išma-ilum (received).
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
7(asz@c) 3(barig@c) 4(ban2@c) _ziz2 gur_ a-na _numun_ isz-ma2-dingir im-hur [_a-ra2 1(disz@t)]-kam_ [...] _gur_ _a-ra2 2(disz@t)-kam_ isz-ma2-dingir
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 075. 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 (P213341) — 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.