Position in chronology
MAD 4, 002
About this tablet
A short accounting memorandum from Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar) in the Old Akkadian period, the age of the Sargonic empire (ca. 2300 BCE). A bookkeeper records silver and the livestock charged against it — a mule and four oxen — and then notes an outstanding deficit of 180 gur of barley, measured by the official capacity standard of Agade, the imperial capital. The final line assigns the account to a household or estate, that of a man named Ḫalum. It is a small window onto how the Akkadian state standardized weights and measures across its provinces.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a balance note. Two-thirds of a shekel of silver is on the books; against that sum are set one male equid and four oxen. The account still shows a shortfall: 180 gur of barley — reckoned in the official gur-measure of Agade, the capital's standard — remains outstanding. The whole entry is filed under the household of Ḫalum. In other words: Ḫalum's estate has drawn silver and animals, and still owes the administration a large quantity of barley.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 2/3 (shekel) of silver — therefrom: 2. 1 male equid, 3. 4 oxen. 4. Deficit: 5. 180 gur of barley, 6. in(?) the gur-measure of Agade. 7. House(?) of Ḫalum.
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
2/3(asz@c) _ku3-babbar sza-bi3_ 1(asz@c) _kunga2-nita_ 4(asz@c) _gu4_ _la2-ia3_ 3(gesz2@c) _sze gur_ in#? _gur_ a-ga-de3 _e2#?_ ha-lum
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 002. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215164) — 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.