Position in chronology
MAD 1, 321
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from Ešnunna in central Mesopotamia, written during the Akkadian empire (around 2300 BCE), when Akkadian was displacing Sumerian as the language of administration. It records barley transactions: a scribe named Tabsiga holds five gur of barley as an interest-bearing debt, while the merchant Nabium has received a much larger consignment — over sixty gur — for an exchange operation. The grand total of 271-plus gur shows this is an extract from a larger ledger, a glimpse of credit and commerce in one of the world's earliest commercial economies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a barley account. The first entry, under a name now broken away, is followed by a loan: Tabsiga the scribe owes 5 gur of barley as an interest-bearing debt. Then a bigger item: Nabium the merchant took receipt of 62 gur of barley for an exchange transaction. The bottom line tallies everything at 271 gur of barley — roughly 65,000 liters — with a damaged figure possibly adding a bit more. In modern terms: a ledger page recording who holds grain on credit and who has drawn stock for trading.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. Nu-[...] 2. 5 gur of barley: 3. Tabsiga, 4. the scribe — 5. (as) an interest-bearing loan. 6. 62 gur of barley 7. Nabium 8. the merchant received, 9. for the exchange of [barley]. 10. Total: 271 [+ n] gur of barley.
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
nu-[...] 5(asz@c) _sze gur_ tab6-si-ga _dub-sar_ hu-bu-lum# 1(gesz2@c) 2(asz@c) _sze gur_ na-bi2-um# _dam-gar3_ im-hur a-na sza-pu-ul#-ti# [_sze_] szunigin 4(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) 1(asz@c) [n] _sze gur_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 1, 321. 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 (P215149) — 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.