Position in chronology
MAD 1, 280
About this tablet
An Old Akkadian barley account from Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar in eastern Iraq), written in the later third millennium BCE. A large stock of grain — over 140 gur — is booked against a threshing-floor or storage depot and a household, and then smaller lots of two to four gur are assigned to named individuals, each tagged with the person to whom the grain is credited or who stands behind the transaction. The final entry is explicitly a hubullum, an interest-bearing loan, showing credit operations embedded in routine grain administration at one of the key Akkadian-period cities of the Diyala region.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The ledger opens with the big figure: roughly 140-plus gur of barley on account, charged to the threshing-floor stores and to the household, under Ibbi-bī, on behalf of Gabala. Then come the individual allocations: two gur to Gigi; two gur to Ibbisa, on the account of Salim-ahu; two gur to Ibbi-bī, on the account of Šu-ilīsu; three gur to Utu-e, on the account of Zuzu of Amālum. The last line records four gur of barley issued as an interest-bearing loan, likewise on the account of Zuzu of Amālum.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 142 gur, 2 barig, 3 ban of barley (lit. 2 sixties 20 gur 2 barig 3 ban), 2. (that) of the threshing-floor (maškanim?), 3. (that) of the household, 4. Ibbi-bī, 5. of (fem.) Gabala. 6. 2 gur of barley: Gigi; 7. 2 (gur): Ibbisa, 8. of Salim-ahu; 9. 2 (gur): Ibbi-bī, 10. of Šu-ilīsu; 11. 3 (gur): Utu-e (E₂ written over an erroneous SA), 12. of Zuzu, of (fem.) Amālum; 13. 4 gur of barley, 14. (as) an interest-bearing loan (hubullum), 15. of Zuzu, of (fem.) Amālum.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
2(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) 2(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) _sze gur_ szu masz-gan?-im szu _e2_-ti i-bi2-bi2 szi ga-ba-la 2(asz@c) _sze gur_ gi-gi 2(asz@c) i3-bi2-sa sza sa2-lim-a-hu 2(asz@c) i-bi2-bi2 szu szu-i3-li2-su 3(asz@c) utu-e2!(SA) szu zu-zu szi a-ma-lim 4(asz@c) _sze gur_ hu-bu-lum szu zu-zu szi a-ma-lim
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 1, 280. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA (P215109) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-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.