Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 063
About this tablet
An administrative grain-distribution tablet from Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), dated to the Akkadian period, roughly 2350–2150 BCE. It records allocations of semolina and possibly other commodities to several named temple establishments, including the e₂-mah ('great temple') and a storehouse called the e₂-GAN₂-iš. The lower half of the tablet is substantially damaged, leaving multiple recipients and quantities only partially legible. Documents like this are the routine grain ledgers of Mesopotamian temple economies — the everyday paperwork that tracked how food was distributed among institutions and their dependent workers.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet opens with a list of grain allocations. Seven units of semolina come first, then sixty units of something labeled gu-la₂, followed by two ban₂ each destined for the Great Temple and for a place called the field-storehouse. Further entries assign rations to the house of a deity named Ašgi and to at least one other location. Seven units apiece are listed under 'dar-gag' and what may be silver. The tablet ends with a single-unit entry whose recipient is broken away — and several lines in the lower half are too damaged to read at all.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine7 [capacity units] of semolina, 60 [units,] gu-la₂, 2 ban₂ [for] the great temple (e₂-mah), 2 ban₂ [for] the e₂-GAN₂-iš, [n units for] the house of Ašgi[?], [n units,] 1 ban₂, ki-[an], [7? units,] the house of x, x-[x], 7 [units,] dar-gag, 7 [units,] silver(?), [x]-x, 1 [unit,] x-[...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
7(asz@c) dabin 1(gesz2@c) gu#-la2 2(ban2@c) e2-mah 2(ban2@c)# e2-GAN2-isz [n] e2 asz8-[gi4] [n] 1(ban2@c)# ki-[an] 7(asz@c)#? e2#-x x-[x] 7(asz@c) dar-gag 7(asz@c) ku3 [x]-x 1(asz@c) x-[...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 063. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 273 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts, P472363). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
Related tablets
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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.