Position in chronology
TCBI 1, 019
About this tablet
A small clay receipt from the Sumerian city of Adab (modern Bismaya, in southern Iraq), written in the Early Dynastic period. It records the delivery of a single cowhide into an institutional household, names the men involved, and dates the transaction by month and by the sitting governor, Mes-kigala of Adab. Documents like this are the routine bookkeeping of a temple or palace storeroom — a hide arriving, logged so that someone could later be held accountable for it. Mes-kigala is a historically attested ruler of Adab, so the tablet also serves as a small dated anchor in the city's chronology.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received: one cowhide. Handed over by Šu-agiam(?) and Lu-nanam — the next line is lost — into the household of […]. Delivery logged in the month of Šu-gar, during the term of Mes-kigala, governor of Adab. The upper face of the tablet is too worn to read; only the reverse, with the date and the governor's name, survives clearly.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 cowhide, (from/by) Šu-agiam(?), Lu-na-[nam], [...] the house of [...], delivered. Month: Šu-gar. (In the governorship of) Mes-ki-gal[a], governor (ensi) of Adab.
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) kusz# ab2 [szu]-a#-gi4#-am3# lu2#-na#-[nam] [...] e2#-[...] mu#-[kux(DU)] iti# szu#-gar# mes-ki-gal-[la] ensi2 adab
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC) ?) — TCBI 1, 019. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy (P382271) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.
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.