Position in chronology
MAD 4, 104
About this tablet
A receipt from Umma, in southern Iraq, from the time of the Akkadian empire (around 2300–2200 BCE). It records that a man named Lugal-KA-e took delivery of 99 gur of barley and 5 gur of emmer wheat, grain that belonged to, or came from, a man named Lugal-TAR. The text names a palace and is dated by a running count, year 6 and month 6, rather than by a named year. It is a small, typical piece of the grain bookkeeping that kept a Sargonic provincial administration running.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Ninety-nine gur of barley, measured by the sag-gal2-dul3 standard, and five gur of emmer wheat: this is Lugal-TAR's grain. Lugal-KA-e has received it. Also noted are the gala and the scribe, and the palace of U.EDIN. Dated year 6, month 6.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse/Reverse (as given): 1. 99 (literally 1 sixty 40 minus 1) gur of barley, (by the) sag-gal2-dul3 (gur measure); 2. 5 gur of emmer — 3. it is the barley of Lugal-TAR. 4. Lugal-KA-e 5. received (it). 6. The gala, the scribe; 7. palace of U.EDIN. 8. Year 6, month 6.
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
1(gesz2) 4(u) la2 1(asz) sze gur sag-gal2-dul3 5(asz) ziz2 gur sze lugal-TAR-kam lugal-KA-e szu ba-ti gala dub-sar e2-gal |U+EDIN| 6(disz@t) mu 6(disz@t) iti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 104. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215266) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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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.