Position in chronology
HSS 10, 195
About this tablet
A personnel account from Gasur (the site later known as Nuzi, in northern Iraq) during the Old Akkadian period, around 2300 BCE — one of the earliest archives from this town. The tablet counts laborers attached to an estate or institution: grown men, women workers, and boys, some grouped under a named overseer and some assigned to the threshing floor. Though badly broken, it is a snapshot of how the Akkadian administration organized and tallied its workforce on the empire's northeastern fringe.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a broken workforce tally. It opens with an entry of two of something now lost, then lists a group described as 'the threshing-floor crew,' a number of able-bodied men, and personnel under a man named Išmā-ilum; several more entries of men follow but are too damaged to read. The totals at the end survive best: at least 13 boys, at least 42 female workers, and at least 26 able-bodied men — the leading digits of each figure are broken away, so the true numbers were somewhat higher.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 2 [...] 2. ...[...] 3. those of the threshing floor (šūt maškan), 4. [n] able-bodied men, 1 [...] 5. Išmā-ilum [...] 6. [n] able-bodied men [...] 7. [...] 8. [...] 9. [...] 10 ... 10. [n+]13 male children, 11. [n+]42 female workers, 12. [n+]26 able-bodied men.
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
2(asz@c)# [...] x-[...] szu#-ut masz-kan2 [n] _gurusz#_ 1(asz@c) [...] isz-ma2-dingir# [...] [n] _gurusz_ [...] [...] [...] [...] 1(u@c) x [n] 1(u@c) 3(asz@c) _dumu-nita#_ [n] 4(u@c) 2(asz@c) _geme2_ [n] 2(u@c) 6(asz@c) _gurusz#_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 195. 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 (P213460) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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