Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 158
About this tablet
This is a Sargonic-period (Akkadian empire, c. 2300–2200 BCE) administrative inventory from the city of Adab, tallying craft goods and equipment stored across two institutions. The scribe counts caps or head-coverings (old and newly made), reed baskets in stock, a batch of finished copperwork, and wooden spear-shafts, dividing the totals between the Emah temple and a general storehouse called the E-nigur. Tablets like this are the routine bookkeeping of a Sargonic provincial center, showing how a temple economy tracked manufactured goods — textiles/leather, containers, metal tools, and weapon parts — moving between workshops and storage.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Inventory count: 75 caps, some of them old stock. Sixty baskets are on hand. Forty-two of the caps are newly made, five are old. The copper order has been completed. Seventeen spear-shafts (wooden poles) go to the Emah temple, and separately there are thirty-five more shafts, of which thirty-one old ones are assigned to the general storehouse. In short: a stocktaking of caps, baskets, finished copper goods, and spear-shafts, split between two storage points in the city of Adab.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine75 caps, old caps. 60 baskets in stock (available). 42 new caps, 5 old caps. Copper — the work (is) finished. 17 (i.e. 20 minus 3) spear-shafts (long-wood) — (for) the Emah. 35 spear-shafts, 31 old shafts (wood) — (for) the storehouse (E-nigur).
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) sagszu sagszu libir 1(gesz2@c) pisan i3-gal2 4(u@c) 2(asz@c) sagszu gibil 5(asz@c) sagszu libir uruda# kin til-am3 2(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) gesz-gid2-da e2-mah 3(u@c) 5(asz@c) gesz-gid2-da 3(u@c) 1(asz@c) gesz libir e2-nig2-gur11
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 158. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 054 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472458). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (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.