Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 177
About this tablet
An Akkadian-period wool disbursement record from Adab, a city in central-southern Iraq, dating roughly to 2300–2100 BCE. Four individuals — bearing both Sumerian and Akkadian names, almost certainly women engaged in textile production or its supervision — each draw two talents of raw wool from the city's wool depot, for a combined total of eight talents. Wool processing was one of the largest managed industries in ancient Mesopotamia, employing thousands of women in palace and temple workshops, and tablets like this one were the everyday paperwork that kept the system running: tracking who got what, from whom, and in which month. The date line uses the local Adab calendar, a reminder that cities maintained their own month-naming traditions even within a shared political and administrative world.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Four workers — Mama-ummi, Nin-adgal, Se[be]tum, and Nin-nigzu — each drew two talents of wool from the wool-workers, eight talents in total among them. The wool-workers handed it over and the transaction was duly recorded, dated to the month of GAN₂-eš-gar-šu-gar.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 talents of wool — (for) Mama-ummi; 2 (talents, for) Nin-adgal; 2 (talents, for) Se[be]tum; 2 (talents, for) Nin-nigzu. Total: 8 talents of wool. From the wool-workers, they received. Month: GAN₂-eš-gar-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
2(asz@c) siki gu2 ma-ma-um-mi 2(asz@c) nin-ad2-gal 2(asz@c) se#-[be2]-tum 2(asz@c) nin#-nig2-zu# szunigin 8(asz@c) siki gu2 ki siki-ke4-ne szu ba-ti-esz2 iti GAN2-esz2-gar3-szu-gar
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 177. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 207 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472477). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.