Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 259
About this tablet
This is a small administrative receipt from Adab, recording disbursements of bitumen (a tar-like sealant used for waterproofing boats, baskets, and building foundations in ancient Mesopotamia) from a household or institutional store. It names the officials and intermediaries responsible — a courier, a household manager, a governor (ensi2), and a person named Ur-a2 who seems to be accountable for the final entry — and closes with a month name, part of a local Adab calendar. Tablets like this are the paperwork of a bureaucratic economy: unglamorous but precious evidence of how goods moved through Akkadian-period institutions.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Twelve units of bitumen, drawn from the household stores, were issued through the courier Giri-gena and booked out by the household manager. A further, now-illegible quantity of bitumen from the same household stock went to two men, Šeš-šeš and Lu-am-GIŠGALxIGI. Separately, five units of bitumen were allotted to the governor and recorded as settled or accounted for, with a man named Ur-a2 apparently responsible for the transaction. The record is dated to the month of Šu-gar.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine12 (units) bitumen — the household ration — via Giri-gena (the courier), the household manager: was disbursed. [n] (units) bitumen — the household ration — (for) Šeš-šeš, (and) Lu-am-GIŠGALxIGI. 5 (units) bitumen — (for) the governor — returned/accounted for (in hand): it is (the charge of) Ur-a2. Month: Šu-gar.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(u@c) 2(asz@c) esir5 e2-ba giri3-gen-na szabra e2-ka ba-zi [n ]esir5 e2-ba szesz-szesz lu2-am-|GISZGALxIGI| 5(asz@c) esir4 ensi2 szu-a gi4-a ur-a2-kam iti szu-gar
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 259. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 144 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472559). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.