Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 287
About this tablet
This is a small personnel roster from the city of Adab (modern Bismaya), dating to the Akkadian period. A scribe recorded the names and trades of five workmen — leatherworkers, a carpenter, and smiths — grouped under two overseers, one associated with the title 'gala' and the other named Dada, with a final tally confirming the count. Tablets like this are the everyday bookkeeping of Mesopotamian institutional workshops, tracking who worked where and under whom, and they are one of our main sources for how ancient labor was organized and supervised.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet tallies five craftsmen working at Adab. Ugudu and Ur-kalga are listed as leatherworkers, under an overseer connected to the gala (a class of cultic singers, or possibly a man named Gala). Amu is named as a carpenter. Urmes and Elala are recorded as smiths, working under an overseer named Dada. The scribe closes with a summary: five men in total, all belonging to the craft-workshop personnel (geš-kin-ti).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (man): Ugu-du 1 (man): Ur-kalga overseer of the gala (lament-singers) they are leatherworkers (aszgab) 1 (man): A-mu (a) carpenter (nagar) 1 (man): Ur-mes 1 (man): E-lala they are smiths (simug) overseer: Da-da Total: 5 men — craft-workshop personnel (geš-kin-ti)
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) ugu2-du3 1(asz@c) ur-kal-ga ugula gala aszgab-me 1(asz@c) a-mu nagar 1(asz@c) ur-mes 1(asz@c) e-la-la# simug-[me] ugula da-[da] szunigin# 5(asz@c) lu2# gesz-kin-ti#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 287. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 252 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472587). 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.