Position in chronology
MAD 1, 325
About this tablet
An administrative inventory from Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar in eastern Iraq), written in the Old Akkadian period, roughly 2300–2150 BCE. A storehouse clerk is counting stocks of wooden implements and craft materials: hoe-heads, shovels, beds, molds, items of poplar and other timber, and ropes or cordage. Tablets like this are the raw paperwork of a palace or temple economy, showing how carefully even humble farm tools were tracked.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Stock count: thirteen zar-...u items; four toothed blades; thirty pieces of poplar wood; two beds; twenty-nine hoe-heads (recorded as 'thirty less one'); twenty-seven shovels ('thirty less three'); sixty-seven pieces of še-du wood; about ten molds, probably for bricks; and one hundred forty rope or cordage items. The entries for several items are chipped away, so what exactly some of these objects were is no longer readable, but the list is clearly a warehouse inventory of tools and worked wood.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 13(?) zar-[...]u-objects 2. 4 "tooth-and-claw" (toothed blades/tool parts) 3. 30 ...(?) of [wood of the] poplar 4. 2 beds(?) 5. 30 less 1 (= 29) hoe-heads 6. 30 less 3 (= 27) shovels 7. 67 ...(?) of [wood of the] še-du₁₀-tree 8. 10(?) [... brick(?)]-molds 9. 140 [...] of eš-bara (rope/cordage items(?))
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(u@c)#? 3(asz@c) za-ar-[...]-u3 4(asz@c) zu2 umbin 3(u@c) kam#? []ildag3 2(asz@c) nu2#? 3(u@c) la2 1(asz@c) al-sag 3(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) mar 1(gesz2@c) 7(asz@c) kam []sze-du10 1(u@c)#? [n i3?]-szub 2(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) [...] esz2#-bara2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 1, 325. 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 (P215153) — 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.