Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 266
About this tablet
This is a small administrative memorandum from Adab, dated to the Akkadian period, recording two heavy woolen garments (bar-dul5, a type of cloak) along with their exact weights in minas and shekels. The final surviving line assigns the entry to a 'bur-gul' — a stone-cutter or seal-cutter, a skilled craftsman who worked precious or semi-precious stone. Such texts are part of the everyday bookkeeping of institutional workshops, tracking the movement of valuable textiles to or through the hands of named professionals.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This record logs two heavy cloaks, weighed out precisely: one weighing 6 minas and 5 shekels, the other 4 and a half minas. The next two lines are broken and illegible. The entry closes by noting that it concerns (or belongs to) a stone-cutter — likely the craftsman receiving or associated with these garments in some institutional transaction.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 bar-dul5 garment, its weight: 6 minas, 5 shekels. 1 bar-dul5 garment, its weight: 4 1/2 minas. [......] [......] It is (for/of) the stone-cutter (bur-gul).
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
1(asz@c) bar-dul5 ki-la2-bi 6(disz) ma-na 5(disz) gin2# 1(asz@c) bar-dul5 ki-la2-bi 4(disz) 1/2(disz) ma#-na [...] [...] bur-gul-am3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 266. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 255 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472566). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.