Position in chronology
MAD 1, 309
About this tablet
A small fragment of an administrative account from Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar) in the Old Akkadian period, around 2300 BCE. It lists personal names, each credited with the quantity 'twenty minus two' — eighteen units of some commodity whose name was in the lost opening lines. Such tablets are the routine bookkeeping of an early Mesopotamian bureaucracy, allocating identical shares or rations to a roster of individuals. The subtractive way of writing 18 ('20 less 2') is characteristic of cuneiform accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a piece of a distribution list. The top of the record is broken away, so we no longer know what was being handed out, but the surviving lines read like entries in a ledger: a man whose name ends in -tunaksinum, then Šu-Mama — eighteen; U-KA-KA — eighteen; Zunanum — eighteen; and Uzazum — eighteen. Four men, equal shares of eighteen units each, written in the accountant's shorthand of 'twenty minus two.'
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Beginning destroyed) [...] [Tu]naksi[num]: 20 minus 2 (= 18) — Šu-Mama; 20 minus 2 (= 18) — U-KA-KA; 20 minus 2 (= 18) — Zunanum; 20 minus [2 (= 18) — U]zazum.
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
[...] [tu]-na-ak-si#-[num] 2(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) szu-ma-ma# 2(u@c)# la2 2(asz@c) u2-KA-KA 2(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) zu-na-num2 2(u@c) la2# [2(asz@c) u2]-za-zum
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 1, 309. 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 (P215137) — 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.