Position in chronology
MAD 4, 032
About this tablet
An administrative barley account from the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, around 2300 BCE. A scribe lists large quantities of grain — each entry in the tens of gur, hundreds of liters apiece — credited to or disbursed against six named individuals such as Ur-TAR and Ama-bara. Records like this are the ledgers of early state economies: the barley may be harvest income, rations, or loans, but the format itself shows an institution tracking grain person by person. Its exact findspot is unknown; the tablet is now in the Louvre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a grain ledger listing amounts of barley against people's names, all measured in the large 'sag-gal' gur unit (each gur roughly 240 liters). Ur-TAR is down for 56 gur and 2 ban; Ama-bara for 70 gur and 2 ban; Lul-gu-ak for 77 gur; Lugal-ašni for 53 gur; a man whose name ends in '-šeš' for 63 gur; and after a damaged stretch, a Lugal-(something) for 61 gur. In total the readable entries account for well over 350 gur — tens of thousands of liters of barley moving through one administrator's books.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 56 gur 2 ban (?) of barley, (measured in) the sag-gal gur, 2. (for/from) Ur-TAR; 3. 70 gur 2 ban (?) of barley, 4. (for/from) Ama-bara; 5. 77 gur of barley, 6. (for/from) Lul-gu-ak; 7. 53 gur of barley, 8. (for/from) Lugal-ašni; 9. 63 gur of barley, 10. (for/from) [...]-šeš; 11. [...] (Break) 12. 61 gur of barley, 13. (for/from) Lugal-[...].
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) 6(asz) 2(ban2)? sze gur sag-gal2 ur-TAR 1(gesz2) 1(u) 2(ban2)? sze gur ama-bara2 1(gesz2) 1(u) 7(asz) sze gur lul-gu-ak 5(u) 3(asz) sze gur lugal-asz-ni 1(gesz2) 3(asz) sze gur [...]-szesz# [...] 1(gesz2) 1(asz) sze gur lugal-[...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 032. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215194) — 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.