Position in chronology
MAD 4, 128
About this tablet
A small receipt from Umma in southern Iraq, written in the Sargonic (Akkadian-empire) period around 2300–2200 BCE. It records sheepskins and ewe skins taken from a man whose partly lost name seems to be Asar-antila, apparently by a group of recipients. Hides were a valuable by-product of the great flocks kept by Mesopotamian institutions, and they were passed on to leatherworkers. The tablet is damaged, so the quantities and the full date are lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received: some sheepskins (the number is lost) from Ama-e, and some ewe skins (again, the number is lost). One further line is missing. The skins came from Asar-antila, and the recipients took delivery of them. The tablet ends with a damaged date: the number 23, followed by a year name and a month that can no longer be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse(?) 1. [...] sheep(?) skin(s), 2. Ama-e (or: the 'house-mother'), 3. [...] ewe skin(s), 4. [......] 5. [from A]sar[-antil]a, 6. they received (them). 7. 23 ... year [......], month [......]
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
[...] kusz udu#? ama-e2 [...] kusz u8 [...] [ki a?]-sar#-[an-ti-la]-a-ta mu-gid2?-de3?-esz2 2(u) 3(disz@t) mu [...] iti#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 128. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215290) — 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.