Position in chronology
MAD 4, 120
About this tablet
A receipt from the provincial administration of Umma in southern Iraq, written in the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, around 2300–2200 BCE. It records a large delivery of threshed barley, nearly 350 gur, roughly 100,000 litres, harvested from a named field. The barley is credited to a man called Ur-ankinu and was received by Lugal-KA-e. Records like this show how the Akkadian state tracked grain from the threshing floor into its storehouses.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: 349 gur of barley, measured with the standard large gur and checked as correct. The account is under Ur-ankinu. This is threshed barley from the farmland of the Enlila field. Lugal-KA-e has received it. Dated the fourth month.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse/Reverse (single continuous text as given): 1. 349 (lit. 360 minus 11) gur of barley, by the standard (sag-gal2) gur, correct (measure); 2. Ur-ankinu: 3. threshed barley 4. (from) the meadowland of the field Enlila. 5. Lugal-KA-e 6. received (it). 7. Month 4.
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
6(gesz2) la2 1(u) 1(asz) sze gur sag-gal2 si-sa2 ur-an-ki-nu2 sze gesz ra-a agar4 a-sza3 en-lil2-la2 lugal-KA-e szu ba-ti 4(disz@t) iti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 120. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215282) — 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.