Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 006
About this tablet
An Akkadian-period administrative tablet from Adab (modern Bismaya, Iraq) recording a tally or allocation of sheep distributed among several named individuals. The recipients carry typical Sumerian personal names — Adda, Inimmanizi, E2-damsi, Ninda — reflecting the Akkadian period's continued use of Sumerian for personal names and official record-keeping even as Akkadian became the dominant spoken language. The tablet is fragmentary: at least one entry and the closing section are missing. It is the routine livestock-management paperwork of a palace or temple institution at ancient Adab.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a sheep-allocation record. The first entry logs 32 (plus an uncertain additional number) sheep associated with a person named Adda. Subsequent entries credit 23 sheep to Inimmanizi, 30 to E2-damsi, and 30 to Ninda. A final partial entry records 8 (plus an unknown further number) for a person whose name is too broken to read. The rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine32 + [n] sheep Adda [n +] 23 — Inim-ma-ni-zi 30 — E2-dam-si 30 — Nin-da [n +] 8 — [lu2...]-u2-[...] [remainder broken]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
3(u@c) 2(asz@c) [n] udu ad-da 2(u@c)#? 2(u@c) 3(asz@c) inim-ma-ni-zi 3(u@c) e2-dam-si 3(u@c) nin-da [n] 8(asz@c)# LU2@s-u2-x [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 006. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 176 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472306). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.