Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 281
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tally from the Sargonic (Akkadian) period at Adab (modern Bismaya), listing seven personal names each followed by a numeral. It belongs to the vast body of everyday accounting texts — rosters of workers, rations, or livestock counts — that Mesopotamian scribes produced by the thousands to track people and goods moving through temple or palace households. No commodity word or verb survives, so we cannot say exactly what was being counted, but the format matches simple personnel or allotment lists common in this period and region.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a short list of names, each paired with a number: Mama gets 1, Geme-Enlil's number is missing or broken, Aštar gets 3, Nin-adgal gets 2, Tani gets 1, Nig-banda gets 1, and Sebetum gets 1. It reads like a simple roster or distribution record — seven people, each assigned a quantity of something — but the tablet doesn't tell us what that something is, since no commodity or unit word survives in the text we have.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (unit) — Mama () — Geme-Enlil 3 (units) — Aštar 2 (units) — Nin-adgal 1 — Tani 1 — Nig-banda 1 — Sebetum
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) ma-ma () geme2-en-lil2 3(asz@c) asz-dar 2(asz@c) nin-ad2-gal 1(disz) ta2-ni2 1(asz@c) nig2-banda3 1(asz@c) se-be2-tum
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 281. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 164 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472581). 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.