Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 009
About this tablet
A grain-commodities account from the Akkadian period (roughly 2334–2154 BCE), recording multiple categories of cereal goods — flour, barley, beer-bread, and coarse groats — measured in the standard Sumerian capacity system and summed to a single grand total. The final line gives the name of the official responsible: Annašum, a Sumerian name meaning roughly 'given by the sky-god Anu.' Tablets like this were the everyday paperwork of Mesopotamian institutions — temples or palace storehouses — tracking incoming or outgoing grain stocks. One line is broken beyond recovery, but the surviving arithmetic is internally consistent with a total of 48 gur.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received (or issued): 11 gur, 1 barig, 1 ban₂ of flour; 25 gur of barley; 3 gur of beer-bread; and — after a gap in the record that is now lost — a further 1 gur and 2 barig of coarse groats. Grand total: 48 gur, 1 barig, 1 ban₂. Accountable official: Annašum.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine11 gur, 1 barig, 1 ban2 of flour 25 gur of barley 3 gur of beer-bread [...] (broken) [n+]1 gur, 2 barig of groats 48 gur, 1 barig, 1 ban2 — grand total Annašum
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(u@c) 1(asz@c) 1(barig@c) 1(ban2@c) zi3 gur 2(u@c) 5(asz@c) sze gur 3(asz@c)# bappir gur [...] x [n] 1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) nig2-ar3-ra gur 5(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) 1(barig@c) 1(ban2@c) szunigin an-na-szum2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 009. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 074 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from uncertain (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472309). 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.