Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 147
About this tablet
An administrative receipt from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, dating to the Akkadian period (roughly 2300–2100 BCE). It records two deliveries of sheep hides — 233 in the first batch and 22 in the second, 255 in total — handed over to a named recipient, all within a single month. Leather was a critical material for sandals, straps, quivers, and containers, and records like this one were how a temple or palace storehouse tracked the flow of raw animal products into its workshops. The two-installment structure likely reflects hides arriving from different flocks or herding groups during the same accounting period.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two separate deliveries of sheepskins are noted here. The first brought 233 hides; the second brought 22 — for a combined total of 255. All of them were handed over to Munira (or credited to his named account) by an unnamed official or institution. The transaction was recorded in the month of šu-gar.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine233 sheep hides — first installment; 22 sheep hides — [second installment]; to Munira [lit. 'for his account'], it was given to him. Month: šu-gar.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
3(gesz2@c) 5(u@c) 3(asz@c) kusz udu a-ra2 1(disz)-kam 2(u@c) 2(asz@c) kusz udu# [a]-ra2 [2(disz)-kam] mu#-ni#-ra# e-na-szum2 iti szu-gar
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 147. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 191 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472447). 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.