Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 102
About this tablet
A small provisions docket from Adab in southern Iraq, written when the city's scribes were still using the old Early Dynastic bookkeeping style. It records the catering for an occasion: twelve hundred loaves — half of fine bread, half of ordinary barley bread — together with twenty jars (of beer or another drink) and ten servings of soup, issued to a household or temple. The closing lines give the reason: the ruler of Agade was staying in the city. That makes this tiny tablet an unusually early administrative mention of Agade, the capital that would give its name to the Akkadian empire, glimpsed here through the kitchen accounts of a provincial town.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Catering issue: 1,200 loaves in all — 600 of the fine grade and 600 of plain barley bread, each batch reckoned at one ban₂ of flour and twenty loaves baked — plus twenty jars and ten servings of soup, delivered to the household of [...]. The occasion, noted at the end, was the stay of the ruler of Agade in the city. The name of the receiving household and part of the date formula are damaged.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine600 loaves of sig₁₅-bread (fine/sweet bread): 1 ban₂ (of flour), 20 baked (du₈). 600 loaves of barley bread: 1 ban₂ (of flour), 20 baked (du₈). 20 jars. 10 (servings of) soup. (For) the house/temple of [...]. [At that time(?)] the ruler (ensi₂) of Agade had taken up residence (u₃-mu-ti-la-a).
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(gesz'u@c) ninda sig15 1(ban2@c) 2(u@c) du8 1(gesz'u@c) ninda sze 1(ban2@c) 2(u@c) du8 2(u@c) dug# 1(u@c) tu7# e2#-[x] [u4-ba?] ensi2# a#-ga#-de3# u3-mu-ti-la-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 102. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252785) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-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.