Position in chronology
MAD 4, 049
About this tablet
A small harvest account from the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period at Umma in southern Iraq, roughly 2300–2200 BCE. It records barley that has just been threshed from a newly cultivated field: 41 gur credited to one man, Ur-ab, and 38 gur to another, Lugal-sag, all under the supervision of a foreman named Ur-dam. It is a snapshot of the grain bureaucracy that underpinned the world's first territorial empire — every load of threshed barley counted, assigned to a responsible person, and dated.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Grain ledger: 41 gur of barley, measured by the standard large gur, booked to Ur-ab; 38 gur of barley booked to Lugal-sag. This is threshed barley from the irrigated tract of the new field. Supervising foreman: Ur-dam. Covering a period of four months. In modern terms, roughly 9,800 and 9,100 liters of barley respectively — the output of a freshly opened field, signed off by the man responsible for the work gang.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 40 (and) 1 gur of barley, (in the) sag-gal₂ (measure) — 2. Ur-ab; 3. 40 less 2 gur of barley — 4. Lugal-sag. 5. Threshed barley (lit. "barley beaten with the stick"), 6. (from) the arable tract of the new field. 7. Foreman: Ur-dam. 8. 4 months.
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
4(u) 1(asz) sze gur sag-gal2 ur-ab 4(u) la2 2(asz) sze gur lugal-sag sze gesz ra-a agar4 a-sza3 gibil ugula ur-dam 4(disz@t) iti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 049. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215211) — 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.