Position in chronology
MAD 4, 025
About this tablet
An administrative account from the Old Akkadian period (around 2300 BCE), now in the Louvre. It is a simple tally: quantities of a staple — almost certainly barley measured in gur — set against the names of ten or so individuals, among them a fowler. Lists like this are the everyday bookkeeping of estate and temple economies: rations issued, deliveries received, or obligations outstanding, recorded by a scribe who needed only numbers and names.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A ledger of amounts assigned to named men: ME-Iškur gets 34 measures; Mušen-du the fowler, 16; Lugal-eš, 15; Ka-še, 10; Dada, 18 (written as 'twenty minus two'), with Ur-dingir-tur listed alongside him; Lugal-si, 28 ('thirty minus two'); Ur-gigir, 25; Ur-dingir-tur, 10, together with Lugal-KA; and Ur-mes, 10, together with Ur-du. The tablet does not say what the commodity is or why it changed hands — just who, and how much.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 34 (gur): ME-Iškur 2. 16: Mušen-du (the fowler) 3. 15: Lugal-eš 4. 10: Ka-še 5. 20 less 2 (= 18): Dada 6. (and) Ur-dingir-tur 7. 30 less 2 (= 28): Lugal-si 8. 25: Ur-gigir 9. 10: Ur-dingir-tur 10. (and) Lugal-KA 11. 10: Ur-mes 12. (and) Ur-du
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
3(u) 4(asz) ME-iszkur 1(u) 6(asz) muszen-du3 1(u) 5(asz) lugal-esz3 1(u) ka-sze3 2(u) la2 2(asz) da-da ur-dingir-tur 3(u) la2 2(asz) lugal-si 2(u) 5(asz) ur-gigir2 1(u) ur-dingir-tur lugal-KA 1(u) ur-mes ur-du6
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 025. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215187) — 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.