Position in chronology
MAD 1, 302
About this tablet
An Old Akkadian account tablet from Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar in Iraq), dating to roughly the 23rd century BCE. It is a running list pairing quantities of goods — silver by the shekel and mina, barley, pigs, sheep, beer-bread, even a chariot — with the names of individuals who received or owed them. Such tablets are the day-to-day bookkeeping of a city administration or large household, and they preserve some of the earliest written Akkadian personal names.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger. Amur-ilum is down for 5 shekels of silver, and Aḫūssunu for another 5 shekels. One entry records 4 shekels plus a chariot handed over. Then come larger amounts: 10 minas of silver and 2 gur of barley against the name Kabruru, and 2 minas of lower-grade silver against Zabi. The list closes with livestock and provisions: 8 pigs under Ilī-aḫi, 2 sheep under Uze'um, and 1 ban (about 10 liters) of beer-bread under Zibīnu. In short: who got (or owes) what, in silver, grain, animals, and goods.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 5 shekels of sil<ver> — 2. Amur-ilum; 3. 5 shekels of silver — 4. Aḫūssunu; 5. 4 shekels (of silver and) 1 chariot given; 6. 10 minas of silver, 7. 2 gur of barley — 8. Kabruru; 9. 2 minas of 'small' (low-grade?) silver — 10. Zabi; 11. 8 pigs — Ilī-a[ḫ]i; 12. 2 sheep — Uze'um; 13. 1 ban of beer-bread — 14. Zibīnu.
Our translation engine — Fable 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
5(asz@c) gin2 ku3-<babbar> a-mur-dingir 5(asz@c) gin2 ku3-babbar a-hu-su-nu 4(asz@c) gin2 1(asz@c) gigir2 szum2 1(u@c) ma-na ku3-babbar 2(asz@c) sze gur kab-ru-ru 2(asz@c) ma-na ku3-babbar tur za-bi 8(asz@c) szah2 i3-li2-a?-hi 2(asz@c) udu u-ze2-um 1(ban2@c) bappir zi-bi2-nu
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 1, 302. 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 (P215130) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-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.