Position in chronology
MAD 5, 010
About this tablet
An Old Akkadian administrative note from Kish, written around 2300–2200 BCE, during the Sargonic empire. It lists animals, grain, salt, other goods and one enslaved woman, grouped by the towns where they were held: Irisagrig, Bad-Suen and Kish itself. The last line says that a man named Amur-ilum 'took away' everything listed. It may record a requisition, a seizure or a transfer of assets. The tablet does not give a reason, but it shows people and goods moving between towns in the same administrative account.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Amur-ilum took the following: from Irisagrig, a calf and twenty sheep of mixed kinds; from Bad-Suen, ten large gur of barley and five large gur of salt; from Kish, three items of a kind whose name is broken off and one more item that is also damaged. He also took one more damaged item and a slave woman named Eštar-bītī.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 calf (amar-gir), 20 assorted sheep: in Irisagrig. 10 gur of barley, (by the) large gur (sag-gal), 5 gur, (by the) large gur, of salt: in Bad-Suen (Dūr-Sîn). 3 KIN [......], 1 ka?-[......]: in Kiš. 1 SU [......], 1 Eštar-bītī, a female servant — Amur-ilum took away.
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(asz@c) _amar gir_ 2(u@c) _udu hi-a_ in iri-sa12-rig7 1(u@c) _sze gur sag-gal2_ 5(asz@c) _gur sag-gal2 mun_ in bad3-suen 3(asz@c) KIN [...] 1(asz@c) ka#?-[...] in kisz[] 1(asz@c) SU [...] 1(asz@c) esz18-dar-e2 _geme2_ a-mur-dingir it-ba-al
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 5, 010. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P215337) — 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.