Position in chronology
TCBI 1, 010
About this tablet
A small clay account from Adab in southern Iraq, written some 4,500 years ago in the Early Dynastic period. It tallies onions and garlic — counted both by planted furrow-rows in the field and by processed types (mountain onions, crushed onions, the 'pure' onion, and a tu-variety) — with a personal or institutional name partly broken away. Humble as it looks, it is exactly the sort of vegetable inventory that kept a Sumerian temple or estate kitchen supplied, and it shows scribes already using standardized commodity categories for garden produce.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet counts an onion crop: 20 rows in the field, then a list of types — mountain onions, about 10 more onions (the entry is damaged), 35 crushed onions, 5 of the 'pure' white variety, and 10 of the tu-kind. A further 80 rows of onions are entered, and the account closes with a heading or name, sag-ki, whose exact force is unclear. Several figures and one personal name are broken and can only be restored approximately.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine20 furrow-rows (of onions); mountain-onions (szum2 kur); [...]-elum; [10] onions(?) [...]; 35(?) crushed onions (szum2-gaz); 5 szum-sikil ("pure/white onion"); 10 onions of the tu-type; 80 (1 gesz2 20) furrow-rows of onions; sag-ki (heading / "foremost" entry).
Our translation engine — Opus 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
2(u@c) absin3 szum2 kur [x (x)]-e2-lum# [1(u@c)] szum2#? [x] 3(u@c) 5(asz@c)#? szum2-gaz 5(asz@c) szum-sikil 1(u@c) szum2 tu 1(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) szum2 absin3 sag-ki
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TCBI 1, 010. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy (P382263) — 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.