Position in chronology
MAD 1, 313
About this tablet
A small administrative account from Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar in eastern Iraq) in the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, around 2300 BCE. It lists mixed household and trade commodities — cheese, milk, ghee, hides, footwear, and a large batch of aromatics — the kind of inventory or disbursement record a palace or estate steward kept. Such tablets show the everyday bookkeeping behind the Akkadian empire's economy, mixing Sumerian accounting conventions with Akkadian words.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
An inventory slip: one ban-measure (roughly ten liters) of cheese, one pair of boots, one ban of milk, eight animal hides, and sixty containers of aromatic resins. The next entry is too damaged to read beyond a word ending in '-um,' and the final line records some quantity of ghee — so many sila, less a deducted amount — before the text breaks off.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 ban of cheese, 1 (unit of) boots, 1 ban of milk, 8 hides, 60 birahu(-measures/containers) of aromatics, ... ... KA-um, [...] minus [... n] sila of ghee ...
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(ban2@c) ga-ar3 1(asz@c) suhub2 1(ban2@c) ga 8(asz@c) kusz 1(gesz2@c) bi-ra-hu szim x x KA-um [...] la2# [...] sila3# i3-nun x
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 1, 313. 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 (P215141) — 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.