Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 111
About this tablet
A short administrative record from the ancient city of Adab in Iraq, dated to the Akkadian period (roughly 2334–2154 BCE), tracking large allocations of twisted thread for two institutions: the office of the chief lamentation priest and an establishment called Ezi, connected to the locality of Karkar. The responsible official overseeing the whole account is named only by his title — overseer of the chief lamentation priests — and the record closes with a telling accounting note: the thread is an outstanding deficit, an amount owed but not yet settled. These small workmanlike tablets are the day-to-day paperwork behind the temples' weaving operations, one of the largest industries in ancient Mesopotamia, and they survive in large numbers from Adab precisely because the city's archives were unusually well preserved before modern excavation.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two large consignments of twisted thread are logged here: 1,230 units for the chief lamentation priest's office, and 990 units for the Ezi institution at Karkar — both falling under the responsibility of the overseer of the chief lamentation priests. The bottom line is that this thread is recorded as a shortfall: it has not been delivered or accounted for and is still outstanding. The record is dated to the month of Ab-éziga.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1,230 (units of) twisted thread — (for the) chief lamentation priest. 990 (units of) twisted thread — (for) Ezi; Karkar — (under the) overseer of the chief lamentation priests. The thread: it is a deficit. Month: Ab-éziga.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(gesz'u@c) 3(u) gu sa gala-mah 1(gesz'u@c) 6(gesz2@c)# 3(u) gu sa e2-zi karkar# ugula gala-mah gu la2-ia3#-am3# iti# ab-e3-zi-ga-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 111. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 272 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472411). 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.