Position in chronology
TCBI 1, 012
About this tablet
A small round clay tablet from Adab in southern Iraq, written roughly 4,500 years ago, recording barley handed out to a handful of named men and officials. One entry goes to a lamentation-priest (gala), another to the town herald (nimgir) — the officer who made public announcements. It is ordinary institutional bookkeeping: grain measured in gur and barig, the standard capacity units of Early Dynastic Sumer, allotted person by person.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley disbursements: one gur to Lugal-igi-du; three barig for Me-ki-bi; two gur to DU-HA-A-pa-e, the lamentation-priest; and two gur two barig to the herald. The figures in the first and fourth entries are damaged and not fully certain, and several of the names are only partly legible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 gur of barley (?) Lugal-igi-du. 3 barig — for Me-ki-bi. 2 gur (?) — DU-HA-A-pa-e₃, the gala-priest. 2 gur 2 barig — the herald (nimgir).
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
1(asz@c) sze# gur# lugal-igi-du 3(barig@c)# me-ki-bi#-sze3 2(asz@c)#? DU?-HA-A-pa-e3 gala!(|KU.USZ|) 2(asz@c) 2(barig@c) nimgir#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TCBI 1, 012. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy (P382265) — 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.