Position in chronology
LB 0023
About this tablet
A fragmentary land-account tablet from the Old Akkadian period (around 2300 BCE), now in the Böhl Collection in Leiden. It parcels out agricultural land, plot by plot, to named individuals — among them a man called 'Man of Nippur' and a lamentation priest — and then adds the parcels up into running totals. It is the kind of everyday survey record by which Mesopotamian administrators tracked who held or worked which fields, and it shows how early states measured land in standard units (the eše, about 2.2 hectares, and the bur, three times that).
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a land register, badly damaged at top and bottom. The readable middle portion assigns one eše of field each to four men — Lu-Nibru, U-mu-NI, E-gubbu, and Ur-Ištaran — plus further parcels to Dadaga and to E-zi the lamentation priest, the amounts for those two now lost. A subtotal follows: three bur and one eše of field altogether, roughly 22 hectares. After several broken lines, a second subtotal records one bur of something now lost, and the account closes by naming the field in question — 'field of Si-...' — before the final line breaks off.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Beginning destroyed) [...] [...] ... sa6 [...] [n (area units)] — Dadaga; 1 eše (of field) — Lu-Nibru; 1 eše — U-mu-NI; 1 eše — E-gubbu; 1 eše — Ur-Ištaran; n (area units) — E-zi, the gala (lamentation priest). Total: 3 bur 1 eše of field (GAN2). [...] hoe(?) [...] [...] [...] Total: 1 bur [...]. Field of Si-[...]. ... field(?) ... (rest too damaged to read)
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
[...] [...] sa6 [...] [n] da-da-ga 1(esze3@c) lu2-nibru 1(esze3@c) u3-mu-NI 1(esze3@c) e2-gub-bu 1(esze3@c) ur-isztaran n e2-zi gala szu-nigin2 3(bur3@c) 1(esze3@c) GAN2 [...] al? [...] [...] [...] szu-nigin2 1(bur3@c) [...] a-sza3 si-[...] x GAN2#? x x
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — LB 0023. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: de Liagre Böhl Collection, Netherlands Institute for the Near East, Leiden, Holland (P388598) — 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.