Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 292
About this tablet
This is a small administrative roster from Adab, likely dating to the Sargonic (Akkadian) period, listing groups of craft workers — smiths, carpenters, and reed-workers — each under the supervision of a named foreman. The tablet ends with a total count of workers described as 'stationed' or assigned to duty, a standard bookkeeping category for labor gangs attached to an institution such as a temple or palace household. Though broken in the middle, it offers a glimpse of how craft labor was organized and counted in a provincial Mesopotamian city over four thousand years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a work-crew tally from the city of Adab. It records 3 smiths under the foreman Dada, and 3 carpenters under a foreman named E-mah (the title 'foreman' before his name is partly broken but restorable). Next comes an entry for 2 reed-workers, followed by a line naming '1' of some further category whose name is broken away, and then another line lost entirely. The tablet closes with a grand total: 23 workers, described as men 'stationed' or assigned to their posts — meaning the missing lines in the middle must have listed additional workers to bring the count up from 9 to 23.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 smiths foreman: Dada 3 carpenters [foreman]: E-mah 2 reed-workers (ad-kup4) 1 ki-[...] (broken) [...] (broken) Total: 23 workers, they are stationed/on-duty workers.
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
3(asz@c) simug# ugula# da#-da# 3(asz@c) nagar# [ugula] e2#-mah# 2(asz@c) ad#?-kup4#? 1(asz@c) ki#?-[...] [...] x szunigin# 2(u@c) 3(asz@c) lu2 gub-ba-me
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 292. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 269 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472592). 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.