Position in chronology
HSS 10, 199
About this tablet
A small personnel roster from Gasur (the later Nuzi, in northern Iraq) during the Old Akkadian period, around 2300 BCE. An administrator tallied a work gang by name: a few women — including two listed anonymously simply as 'female workers' — and five men, whose count is given in the total line. Lists like this are the everyday bookkeeping behind ration distributions and labor assignments, and they preserve the mixed Akkadian names of ordinary people who would otherwise be entirely unknown.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a headcount of workers, one line per person: Eštar-ummī; Diri-ni; two unnamed women laborers; Gagadanum; Kibturu; Dingir-muda; Aḫuma; and Bēlī-ilum. At the bottom the clerk adds up the men: five male workers in total. The first entries — Eštar-ummī, Diri-ni, and the two women counted together — are the female members of the group, which is why they fall outside the five-man total.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 1 (person): Eštar-ummī 2. 1 (person): Diri-ni 3. 2 (persons): female workers (geme₂) 4. 1 (person): Gagadanum(?) 5. 1 (person): Kibturu 6. 1 (person): Dingir-muda 7. 1 (person): Aḫuma 8. 1 (person): Bēlī-ilum 9. Total: 5 male workers (guruš)
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) esz18-dar-um-mi 1(asz@c) diri-ni 2(asz@c) geme2 1(asz@c) ga-ga-da?-num2 1(asz@c) ki-ib-tu-ru 1(asz@c) dingir-mu-da 1(asz@c) a-hu-ma 1(asz@c) be-li2-dingir szunigin# 5(asz@c) gurusz
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 199. 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 (P213464) — 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.