Position in chronology
JCS 15, 080 39
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged administrative tablet from Nippur in the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, around 2300 BCE. It lists measured amounts of a commodity — almost certainly barley — issued to or credited against named individuals, several of them women (names beginning with Nin-), with at least one supervisory official, an overseer, among them. The final line dates the account to the month 'when the plough is released,' the point in the agricultural year when ploughing ended. It is a scrap of the everyday grain bookkeeping that kept a Mesopotamian city's households and institutions fed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a page from a grain ledger. The opening entries are broken, but we can still read a run of names with their amounts: something for Lugal-itida; an entry for a person whose name ends in -nin, an overseer; something for Lugal-agrigzi; 4 barig (about 240 liters) for Nin-hegal; 1 ban (about 10 liters) for Ur-...; 4 barig for a woman Nin-...; 1 gur (about 300 liters) for another Nin-...; 4 barig for someone whose name is lost; 1 gur for another lost name; and 1 gur for Sag-.... The account was drawn up in the month when the ploughs were put away. The beginnings of most lines and the top of the tablet are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Beginning broken) 1. [...] ... 2. [...] Lugal-itida, 3. [...]-nin(?), the overseer (nu-banda), 4. ... Lugal-agrigzi, 5. 4 barig: Nin-hegal, 6. 1 ban: Ur-[...], 7. 4 barig: Nin-[...], 8. 1 (gur): Nin-[...], 9. 4 barig: ... [...], 10. 1 (gur): [...], 11. 1 (gur): Sag-[...], 12. Month: "(When) the plough is released" (iti apin-du8-a).
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
[...] x [...] lugal#-iti-da# [x? x]-nin#? nu-banda3 x lugal#-agrig-zi 4(barig@c) nin-he2#-gal2 1(ban2@c) ur#-[x x] 4(barig@c) nin#-[...] 1(asz@c) nin#-[...] 4(barig@c)# x [...] 1(asz@c) [...] 1(asz@c) sag#-[...] iti apin-du8#-[a]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — JCS 15, 080 39. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P214868) — 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.