Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 024
About this tablet
A small administrative record from Adab (modern Bismaya, Iraq), dating to the Akkadian period, roughly 2300–2150 BCE. It tracks the disbursement of a tiny silver ring and two garments — one of a fine imported type, one of second quality — probably through a palace or temple workshop. The reference to a named coppersmith and 'the king's statue' strongly suggests these goods were associated with dressing or equipping a royal cult image, a well-documented temple practice. The tablet closes with a month date, anchoring it in the routine cycle of institutional accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
One silver ring — unraveled, weighing a third of a shekel. One fine garment of the naṣparu variety. One second-quality garment of the bala category. These passed through Enna-num, a coppersmith, in connection with the king's statue — the remaining details of who carried them or exactly how they moved are damaged beyond confident reading. Total: garments issued and disbursed. Dated to the month of the Sacred Mound.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 silver ring, unraveled — its weight: 1/3 shekel. 1 garment of naṣparu-type. 1 garment, second-quality, bala(-type). Enna-num, coppersmith — for the king's statue; [having come with it?] [An-mu?] — garments expended. Month: du6-ku3 (the Sacred Mound).
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(asz@c) ku3 har hu-la ki-la2-bi 1/3(asz@c) 1(asz@c) tug2 na-as-pa2-ru 1(asz@c) tug2 us2 bala en-na-num2 tibira# alan# lugal-da im#-da#?-gen#-na an#-mu4 tug2 zi-ga-a iti du6-ku3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 024. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 035 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472324). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.