Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 286
About this tablet
This small tablet from Adab, dating to the Akkadian (Sargonic) period, is a personnel roster: a short list of named individuals, each counted as a single unit ('1'), grouped under the supervision of an official titled 'overseer of the chief lament-singer.' Such lists were routine bookkeeping — likely a work crew, ration list, or labor levy recorded by a temple or palace scribe. The gala-mah, or 'chief lamentation priest,' both appears as a named entry and lends his title to the supervisory role, suggesting this group may have been attached to a temple's cultic or lament-singing staff.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a simple headcount list. It records, one by one: Ur-sudda (damaged, reading uncertain) — one; E-zi — one; a man whose name is hard to read, something like Ulu-digal — one; and Gala-mah, the chief lament-singer — one. Then comes a supervisory note: 'overseer of the chief lament-singer,' marking the person in charge of the group that follows. Three more men are then tallied, one each: Lugal-lu, Lugal-kura, and Ur-li. The list ends with the name Utu-amu, but that line is broken, so we can't tell if a number originally stood before it.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(asz@c) Ur-sud(a)?# [name partially damaged] 1(asz@c) E-zi 1(asz@c) Ulu-digal# [complex sign, reading uncertain] 1(asz@c) Gala-mah ("chief lament-singer") Overseer of the chief lament-singer 1(asz@c) Lugal-lu 1(asz@c) Lugal-kura 1(asz@c) Ur-li Utu-[a]-mu# [line broken, numeral not preserved]
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) ur-sud3#-da#? 1(asz@c) e2-zi# 1(asz@c) ulux(|GISZGALxIM|)-di-gal# 1(asz@c) gala-mah ugula gala-mah 1(asz@c) lugal-lu 1(asz@c) lugal-kur-ra 1(asz@c) ur#-li# utu-[a]-mu#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 286. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 318 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472586). 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.