Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 163
About this tablet
This is a small Akkadian-period administrative tablet from Adab (modern Bismaya), recording a stock of garlic — some from an older supply, some freshly harvested — totaled and issued to a scribe. Tablets like this were the everyday bookkeeping of a temple or palace household: tracking commodities in and out, crediting them to named officials, and dating the transaction to a harvest-season month. It is a modest but genuine glimpse into the granular accounting that kept Mesopotamian institutions running.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The record tallies 68 units of old garlic and 32 units of new garlic, for a total of 100. This batch was issued to the scribe, under the entry recorded here. The transaction is dated to the month of the barley harvest.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine68 old garlic — 32 new garlic — total: 100 [garlic] — its name (designation) — to the scribe it was given. [Month]: harvest of barley (barley-cutting).
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) 8(asz@c) szum libir 3(u@c) 2(asz@c) szum gibil szunigin 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c)# [szum] mu-ni# dub-sar-ra# e-na-szum2 [iti] sze-sag11-ku5#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 163. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 168 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472463). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.