Position in chronology
MAD 1, 307
About this tablet
A small ration or disbursement list from Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar) in the Old Akkadian period, around 2300 BCE. Eight men each receive one barig — roughly 60 liters — of grain, almost certainly barley. The first name, Tišpakum, is built on Tišpak, the city-god of Ešnunna, anchoring the tablet firmly in its local religious world. Documents like this are the payroll stubs of the earliest territorial empire: terse, standardized, and revealing of who was being fed by the administration.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a distribution list: eight men each get the same standard grain allotment of one barig (about 60 liters). The recipients are Tišpakum, Šu-ilīsu, Erdabu, Warassuni, Dingir-bani, Ilulu, Izamar, and Saga-dingir. One entry's quantity is broken on the tablet but was certainly the same one-barig share as the rest, and the last line is slightly damaged but readable. No totals, dates, or officials are recorded — just names and equal shares, the bare minimum an ancient bookkeeper needed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 1 barig (of barley) — Tišpakum 2. 1 barig — Šu-ilīsu 3. 1 barig — Erdabu 4. 1 barig — Warassuni 5. 1 barig — Dingir-bani 6. 1 barig — Ilulu 7. [1 barig] — Izamar 8. 1 barig — Saga-dingir
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
1(barig@c) tiszpak-kum 1(barig@c) szu-i3-li2-su 1(barig@c) er3-da-bu3 1(barig@c) ARAD2-su2-ni 1(barig@c) dingir-ba-ni 1(barig@c) i3-lu-lu [1(barig@c)] i-za-mar 1(barig@c)# saga-dingir
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 1, 307. 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 (P215135) — 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.