Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 276
About this tablet
This is a short Old Akkadian administrative tablet from Adab (modern Bismaya), recording a roster of female laborers (geme2) organized into pairs under an overseer named Mama-ummi. Six named individuals — likely team-leaders or the women themselves, listed two at a time — bring the total to fourteen workers, tallied by the scribe Ur-Usu. Texts like this document the everyday bureaucracy of institutional labor management (temple or palace workforces) in the Akkadian empire, roughly the late third millennium BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a labor roster: two female workers are recorded under the supervision of Mama-ummi. Six more pairs of two workers each are then listed, associated with the names Geme-Enlil, Aštar, Tania, Nin-adgal, Nigbanda, and Nin-nigzu. Adding them up gives a total of fourteen female workers. The scribe Ur-Usu recorded the tally, and a final notation — either the phrase 'it was given to him' or the name An-na-šum — closes the account.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 female workers (geme2), overseer: Mama-ummi. 2 — Geme-Enlil, 2 — Aštar, 2 — Tania, 2 — Nin-adgal, 2 — Nigbanda, 2 — Nin-nigzu. Total: 14 female workers. Ur-Usu, scribe. An-na-šum (given to him / personal name).
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
2(asz@c) geme2 ugula ma-ma-um-mi 2(asz@c) geme2-en-lil2 2(asz@c) asz-dar 2(asz@c) ta2#-ni2-a 2(asz@c) nin#-ad2#-gal 2(asz@c) nig2-banda3 2(asz@c) nin-nig2-zu szunigin 1(u@c) 4(asz@c) geme2 ur-u4-su13 dub-sar an-na-szum2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 276. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 309 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472576). 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.