Position in chronology
MAD 4, 097
About this tablet
A short grain account from Umma in southern Iraq, written in the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, around the 23rd century BCE, when Umma lay inside the empire of Sargon's dynasty. It records the threshed harvest of a surveyed field: barley, emmer and wheat. The scribe measured the barley with the large 'sag-gal₂' gur, an official capacity unit of the Sargonic administration. The closing note of years and months marks the date or accounting period of the record.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Harvest record: 40 gur of barley, measured with the official large gur, plus 15 gur of emmer and 7 gur 2 barig of wheat. All of this is threshed grain from a field whose area has been surveyed, and the threshing or processing has been completed. Dated: year 4, month 5 (or a span of four years and five months).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse/Reverse (no sides marked in the source): 1. 40 gur of barley, (by the) sag-gal₂ (gur measure); 2. 15 <gur> of emmer; 3. 7 gur 2 barig of wheat: 4. threshed grain, 5. (from) the field whose area was measured; 6. the processing (?) was carried out. 7. 4 year(s), 5 month(s).
Our translation engine — Opus 5.5. 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@c) sze gur sag-gal2 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) ziz2 <gur> 7(asz@c) 2(barig@c) gig gur sze gesz ra-a a-sza3 GAN2 gid2-a a-ra2 ba-ak 4(disz@t) mu 5(disz@t) iti#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 097. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215259) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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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.