Position in chronology
MAD 1, 308
About this tablet
A small, badly broken administrative account from Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar in Iraq), written in the Old Akkadian period, roughly the 23rd century BCE. What survives is a tally: quantities of some commodity — the heading that named it is lost — assigned to or received from men with Akkadian names like Puzur-..., Ilī-maḫri, and Eram-gi. It is a scrap of the everyday bookkeeping that kept the Akkadian state's economy running.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of a ledger. The top of the list is broken off, so we don't know what was being counted — possibly units measured in the 'KIN' standard. What remains reads like a distribution sheet: ten units for someone whose name is lost; an entry for a man named Puzur-(something); four units connected with a KIN-measure for Su-ilī-(something); four units for Ilī-maḫri; and two units for Eram-gi. The rest is gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Beginning destroyed) 1'. 10 [...] 2'. Puzur-[...] 3'. 4 [+ n?] KIN-[...] 4'. Su-ilī-[...] 5'. 4: Ilī-maḫ[ri] 6'. 2: Eram-gi
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(u@c)# [...] puzur4#-[...] 4(asz@c) [n] KIN-[...] su-i3-li2-[...] 4(asz@c) i3#-li2-mah#-[ri2] 2(asz@c) e-ra-am-gi#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 1, 308. 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 (P215136) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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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.