Position in chronology
MAD 4, 026
About this tablet
An administrative barley account from the Old Akkadian period (roughly 2350–2200 BCE), somewhere in Mesopotamia. A scribe records large disbursements of grain — tens of gur, each gur holding on the order of 200–300 liters — against the names of individual recipients, including a gala, a cultic lamentation singer, and finally an institutional household. It is the routine bookkeeping of a grain-based economy, where wealth moved through measured heaps of barley and every allotment was written down.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a grain ledger with four entries. Fifty-plus gur of barley, measured by the standard saggal gur, went to the lamentation priest Ama-emega; sixty-five gur to Lugal-nig; fifty-five gur to A-kalle; and sixty-six gur to the household (the estate itself). The first figure is partly broken, so the exact amount above fifty is lost, and one sign in the second entry is illegible, but the structure is clear: quantity of barley, then the person or institution that received or owed it.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 50 [+ n gur of barley] in the saggal-measure gur, 2. (for) the gala-priest Ama-emega; 3. 65 ... gur of barley, 4. (for) Lugal-nig; 5. 55 gur of barley, 6. (for) A-kalle; 7. 66 gur of barley, 8. for the house(hold).
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
5(u) [... sze] gur sag-[gal2] gala ama-eme2-ga 1(gesz2) 5(asz) x sze gur lugal-nig2 5(u) 5(asz) sze gur a2-kal-le 1(gesz2) 6(asz) sze gur e2-e
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 026. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215188) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
Related tablets
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.