Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 102
About this tablet
This small, lentil-shaped clay tablet from Adab in southern Iraq, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2600–2350 BCE), is a scribal record of foodstuffs — loaves of bread, jars of drink, and portions of soup — issued from a storehouse. The closing lines tie the disbursement to an event described as 'when the governor of Agade was kept alive,' likely commemorating a recovery from illness, a survival, or perhaps an installation. It is historically striking because it names Agade (the city later famous as Sargon's capital, Akkad) with its own governor at a date that may predate or run parallel to the rise of the Akkadian empire, offering a rare glimpse of Agade as an already-functioning polity.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records a distribution of food and drink: six hundred loaves of fine bread plus a smaller measure of extra bread, six hundred loaves of barley bread with the same extra measure, twenty jars of some liquid (likely beer), and ten servings of soup. These supplies came out of a storehouse — its name is broken away — on the occasion, as the text says, 'when the governor of Agade was kept alive.' In other words: a governor of the city of Agade had survived something — illness, danger, or perhaps simply took office — and rations were handed out to mark it. The tablet is a small fragment of ordinary bureaucratic bookkeeping, but it happens to preserve an early, tantalizing mention of Agade and its governor.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine600 (units of) fine bread; 1 ban2 and 20 du8-bread, 600 (units of) barley bread; 1 ban2 and 20 du8-bread, 20 jars, 10 (portions of) soup — (from) the house of [...], [when] the governor of Agade was kept alive (restored to life).
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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-sonnet-5 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.