Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 068
About this tablet
An administrative tablet from the Akkadian period (roughly 2350–2150 BCE), almost certainly from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, recording allocations of garlic to two named individuals: Da-da and Ur-Enlil. The tablet uses the sexagesimal counting system standard in Mesopotamian bookkeeping, and one entry registers a shortfall — 20 allocated, 2 still outstanding, giving a net of 18. Garlic was a staple of the Mesopotamian diet and a routine commodity tracked by temple and palace administrators. Tablets like this are the paper trail of an ancient economy: precise, impersonal, and occasionally humanised by the personal names of the officials who handled the goods.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Da-da's account shows 75 portions of garlic rations, plus a separate entry of 18 portions (20 allocated, 2 short) designated for workers. Ur-Enlil's account records 134 portions of garlic rations. The tablet ends there; nothing further is preserved.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine75 (units of) garlic-rations; 18 (= 20 minus 2) garlic [for] persons — Da-da; 134 (units of) garlic-rations — Ur-[Enlil].
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) szum2-ti 2(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) szum2-tu-lu2 da-da 2(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 4(asz@c) szum2-ti ur#-en-lil2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 068. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 015 (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, P472368). 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.