Position in chronology
MAD 4, 103
About this tablet
A receipt for grain from Umma, in southern Iraq, written in Sumerian under the Akkadian empire of Sargon's dynasty (about 2300–2200 BCE). A man named Lugal-KA acknowledges receiving 63 large measures (gur) of freshly threshed barley, credited to one Ur-a-lu-za and grown on a field called Enlila. An overseer, Ra-bala, is named as the responsible official, and the receipt is dated to the fourth month. It is a small piece of the farm bookkeeping that tracked the harvest from threshing floor to storehouse.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: 63 gur of barley, measured by the large standard gur, credited to Ur-a-lu-za. This is threshed barley from the farm district of the field called Enlila. Lugal-KA has received it. Supervising officer: Ra-bala. Dated the fourth month.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse/Reverse (no side division given in the transliteration) 1. 63 gur of barley, (by the) great gur (sag-gal₂), 2. (from) Ur-a-lu-za; 3. threshed barley 4. of the agar-district of the field Enlila. 5. Lugal-KA 6. received it. 7. Overseer: Ra-bala. 8. Month 4.
Our translation engine — Opus 5.5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(gesz2) 3(asz) sze gur sag-gal2 ur-a-lu3-za sze gesz ra-a agar4 a-sza3 en-lil2-la2 lugal-KA szu ba-ti ugula ra-bala 4(disz@t) iti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 103. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215265) — 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.