Position in chronology
MAD 4, 145
About this tablet
A short receipt from the province of Umma in southern Iraq, written in the Sargonic period, around 2300–2200 BCE, when the kings of Akkad ruled Mesopotamia. It records that a man named Lu-pada took delivery of 127 gur of freshly threshed barley, several tens of thousands of litres, harvested from a named field. A man named Ur-id is listed alongside the grain, and the transaction is tied to the town of Apisal. Documents like this show how the grain harvest moved from the threshing floor into the hands of the officials who managed the province's stores.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: Lu-pada has received 127 gur of barley, measured by the standard sag-gál gur. The grain is listed with Ur-id. It is threshed barley from the Bar-DU field. The transaction belongs to Apisal and is dated to the fifth year, fourth month.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse/Reverse (sides not distinguished in the source): 1. 127 [gur of barley] (by the gur) sag-gál-dul, 2. Ur-id; 3. threshed barley 4. of the agar-field Bar-DU: 5. Lu-pada 6. received it. 7. Apisal. 8. Year 5, 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
2(gesz2) 7(disz) [sze gur] sag-gal2-dul3# ur-i7 sze gesz ra-a agar4 bar-DU lu2-pa3-da szu ba-ti a-pi4-sal4 5(disz@t) mu 4(disz@t) iti#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 4, 145. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P215305) — 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.