Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 153
About this tablet
An Akkadian period delivery receipt from Adab recording a merchant named Ur-Inanna bringing two commodities — a refined material of some kind and copper — whose combined assessed value in silver came to just over 9 shekels. The scribe set down the weight of each commodity in mana, converted each to its silver equivalent, and confirmed the arithmetic with a running total; the numbers check out exactly. Ur-Inanna is a common Sumerian personal name meaning 'servant of the goddess Inanna,' and his title dam-gar3 (Akkadian: tamkārum) marks him as a professional merchant operating within the palace or temple economy. Tablets like this are the routine accounting paperwork of ancient trade — brief, precise, and deliberately durable.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The merchant Ur-Inanna made a delivery of two commodities: 3⅓ mana of a refined quality material, assessed at 6⅔ shekels of silver, and 1⅔ mana of copper, assessed at 2½ shekels of silver. Together those came to exactly 9⅙ shekels. The transaction was recorded in the month of the Barley Harvest.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 1/3 mana of quality refined [commodity] — its silver (value): 6 2/3 shekels; 1 2/3 mana of copper — its silver (value): 2 1/2 [shekels]. Total: 9 shekels, 1/6 (shekel). Ur-Inanna, the merchant, delivered (it). Month: Barley Harvest.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
3(asz@c) 1/3(asz@c) ma-na numun kal-ga ku3-bi 6(disz)# 2/3(|NINDA2x(SZE.2(ASZ))|)# gin2 1(asz@c) 2/3(asz@c) uruda# ma-na ku3#-bi# 2(disz) 1/2(disz)# [gin2] szunigin 9(disz) gin2 igi 6(disz)-gal2 ur-inanna dam-gar3 mu-de6 iti sze-sag11-ku5
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 153. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 042 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472453). 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.