Position in chronology
HSS 10, 078
About this tablet
A small accounting memorandum from Gasur (the later Nuzi, in northern Iraq) in the Old Akkadian period, roughly 2300–2200 BCE. A storehouse clerk logs five successive issues of dabin — a coarse barley flour — numbering each disbursement 'the first time', 'the second time', and so on. It is the running tally behind institutional food supply: unglamorous, but exactly the kind of record that kept an ancient household or administration fed and auditable.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A running log of flour withdrawals, five installments in all. First issue: 1 gur (about 300 liters) of coarse barley flour. Second issue: 2 barig 3 ban (about 150 liters). Third issue: 1 barig 3 ban (about 90 liters). Fourth issue: 5 ban (about 50 liters). Fifth issue: 1 barig 1 ban 5 sila (about 75 liters). Each entry is numbered so the clerk could total the account later; no recipient or date survives on what was provided.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 1 gur of dabin-flour — 2. the 1st time; 3. 2 barig 3 ban of dabin-flour — 4. the 2nd time; 5. 1 barig 3 ban of dabin-flour — 6. the 3rd time; 7. 5 ban of dabin-flour — the 4th time; 8. 1 barig 1 ban 5 sila of dabin-flour — 9. the 5th time.
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
1(asz@c) dabin gur a-ra2 1(disz@t)-kam 2(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) dabin! a-ra2 2(disz@t)-kam 1(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) dabin! a-ra2 3(disz@t)-kam 5(ban2@c) dabin! a-ra2 4(disz@t)-kam 1(barig@c) 1(ban2@c) 5(disz@t) sila3 dabin a-ra2 5(disz@t)-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 078. 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 (P213344) — 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.