Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 188
About this tablet
This is an administrative account from the Akkadian-period city of Adab, recording amounts of wool (and a small quantity of silver) allotted to a list of named women — a common form of textile-workshop bookkeeping in third-millennium Mesopotamia. Each line pairs a quantity in minas with a personal name, evidently workers or recipients drawing rations or wages, followed by a running total in talents and minas. Such tablets are the paperwork of a large institutional weaving operation, the kind that employed dozens of women and required careful weight-accounting by scribes.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a wool ledger. It lists, name by name, how much wool (measured in minas, a unit of weight) went to a series of women: Mamummi gets just under a round number of minas; Geme-Enlil receives 15 minas plus a small silver payment of a shekel and a half; Aštar gets 30; Taniya 15 and a half; and so on down the list — Nin-adgal, Nigbanda, Me-nigin-ta, Nin-nigzu, Sebetum — though a couple of entries near the bottom are too damaged to read. At the end the scribe totals everything up: some number of talents and 11 minas altogether, and notes that the scribe(?) handed the account over.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n] minus 1 mana(s) of wool — Mamummi. 15 (mana) — Geme-Enlil; 1 1/2 shekels of silver. 30 (mana) — Aštar. 15 1/2 (mana) — Taniya. [n] 20 (mana) — Nin-adgal. 32(?) (mana) — Nigbanda. [n] 3 (mana) — Me-nigin-ta. [n (mana)] — Nin-nigzu. [n (mana)] — Sebetum. ... ...-na. [Total:] [n] talent(s) 11 mana(s) — its amount. The scribe(?) gave (it) to him.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[n] la2# 1(disz@t) siki ma-na ma-ma-um-mi 1(u) 5(disz) geme2-en-lil2 1(disz) 1/2(disz) ku3 gin2 3(u) asz-dar 1(u) 5(disz) 1/2(disz) ta2-ni2-a [n] 2(u) nin-ad2-gal 3(u)#? 2(disz) nig2-banda3 [n] 3(disz)# me#-nigin3#-[ta] [n nin]-nig2#-zu# [n se-be2]-tum# [...] [...]-na# [szunigin n] gu2# 1(u) 1(disz) ma-na mu-ni dub#?-[sar?-ra?] e#-na#-[szum2]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 188. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 221 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472488). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.