Position in chronology
HSS 10, 135
About this tablet
A ration or disbursement list from Gasur (the later Nuzi, in northern Iraq) in the Old Akkadian period, around 2300 BCE. A scribe records measured amounts of grain issued to nine individuals, including two women identified as someone's wife. Lists like this are the everyday bookkeeping of an early provincial administration, and the Gasur archive is one of our main windows onto Semitic-speaking northern Mesopotamia under the dynasty of Akkad.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A grain-issue ledger, nine entries long. The wife of a man whose name is broken off gets 3 ban (about 30 liters); Ilu-ilum gets the same. The wife of UD-iš receives 1 barig (about 60 liters), Suma-ilum 30 liters, Išbum 60, Imi-ilum 30. Danuda takes the largest share, 3 barig — roughly 180 liters — while Zaʾue and Bukuzum each receive 60. The commodity itself is not named in what survives, but by genre this is a standard barley ration roll.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 3 ban (of grain) — the wife of [...] 2. 3 ban — Ilu-ilum 3. 1 barig — the wife of UD-iš 4. 3 ban — Suma-ilum 5. 1 barig — Išbum 6. 3 ban — Imi-ilum 7. 3 barig — Danuda 8. 1 barig — Zaʾue 9. 1 barig — Bukuzum
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
3(ban2@c) dam# [...] 3(ban2@c) i-lu5-dingir 1(barig@c) dam UD-isz 3(ban2@c) su4-ma-dingir 1(barig@c) isz-bu3-um 3(ban2@c) i-mi-dingir 3(barig@c) da-nu-da 1(barig@c) za-u2-e 1(barig@c) bu-ku-zum
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 135. 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 (P213400) — 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.