Position in chronology
TCBI 1, 023
About this tablet
A small clay account from Adab in southern Iraq, written roughly 2400 BCE. It records a consignment of reed bundles and other bulk material delivered for work on the city wall, credited in the month of the Akiti festival, and received by Mes-kigalla, the city's ruling governor, from a place called the cedar mountain. Tablets like this are the paperwork behind Sumerian public building: raw material in, an official's name attached, a month recorded so the ledger can be balanced later.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Fifty-six loads of reed and ten zibatum-units of LAGAB material, entered under Ur-gu and assigned to the city wall. Received in the month of the Akiti festival by Mes-kigalla, governor of Adab, from the cedar mountain. The last line and a few sign-endings are broken, but the sense is a receipt: building material booked in against a named construction project, with the responsible official and the month of delivery recorded.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine56 (lit. 60 less 4) gu-loads of ninni-reed; 10 zibatum, LAGAB(-measure); Ur-gu; (for) the city wall — deliv[ery]. Month: A[ki]ti. Mes-kigal[la], governor of Adab, from the cedar mountain [recei]ved.
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(gesz2@c) la2 4(asz@c) ninni5 gu2 1(u@c) zi-ba-tum LAGAB ur-gu bad3 mu#-[kux(DU)] iti a2#-[ki]-ti-kam mes-ki-gal#-[la] ensi2# adab kur erin-ta# _im-[hur]_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC) ?) — TCBI 1, 023. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy (P382275) — 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.