Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 325
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tablet recording a tally of cattle — oxen and cows — sorted by age category (yearlings and two-year-olds), ending in a summary total and the place-name Šuruppak (modern Fara, in southern Iraq). Texts like this were routine bookkeeping, likely tracking herd composition for a temple or estate; Šuruppak is one of the most important early administrative centers of ancient Sumer, though this particular tablet is catalogued to the Akkadian period.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a cattle count. It lists some number of oxen and cows, then a group of mother cows, then breaks the herd down by age: cows and an ox that are two years old, three cows and two oxen that are one year old. The scribe totals the cows at 24. The record is filed under the name Šuruppak, the town where the herd (or the account of it) was kept.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n] oxen (and) cows [n] mother cows [n cows], 2 years old 1(asz) [... ox], 2 years old 3(asz) cows, 1 year old 2(asz) oxen, 1 year old Total: 2(u) 4(asz) [i.e. 24] cows Šuruppak
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
[n] gu4#-ab2 [n] ab2#-ama [n ab2] mu 2(disz@t) 1(asz@c) [n gu4] mu 2(disz@t) 3(asz@c) ab2# mu 1(disz@t) 2(asz@c) gu4 mu 1(disz@t) szunigin 2(u@c)# 4(asz@c)# ab2 szuruppak
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 325. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 208 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from uncertain (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472625). 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.