Position in chronology
SAA 07 087. Record of Items of Gold and Copper (ADD 0963)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 7(Beginning destroyed) (i 1) [1] amulet of gold; (i 2) 4 asallu-vessels of copper; (i 3) 20 large cooking pots of copper, of two homers (capacity) each; (i 5) 3 kettles of copper; (i 6) 3 cauldrons of copper, of 7 seahs (140 litres) each; (i 8) 18 amphoras of copper; (i 9) 20 buckets of copper; (i 10) 20 tureens of copper; (i 11) [x ...]s of copper; (Break) (r ii 1) Total, in the ci[ty ...]; (r ii 2) the sons of the [......]; Dadî and Bi's[î are th]eir names.
State Archives of Assyria, volume 7 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
[01] NA₄.ki-šá-du ⸢KUG.GI⸣ / 04 a-sa-la-a-te URUDU / 20 ÚTUL-MEŠ URUDU KALAG-MEŠ / ša 02 ANŠE-a.a / 03 du-ú-di URUDU / 03 tap-ḫa-a-ni URUDU / ša 7(bán)-a.a / 18 a-ga-na-a-te URUDU / 20 da-la-a-ni URUDU / 20 ma-zi-a-ni URUDU / [x x x]-a-ni URUDU / PAB* ina* ⸢URU*⸣.[x x] / DUMU-MEŠ LÚv.[x x] / mda*-di?-[i] / mbi-iʾ-⸢si?⸣-[i] / MU-MEŠ-šú-[nu o?]
Scholarly note
Neo-Assyrian administrative record (palace or temple), edited by F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate (SAA 7, 1992). ORACC text P335793.
Attribution
Image: Adapted from F. Mario Fales and J. Nicholas Postgate, Imperial Administrative Records, Part I: Palace and Temple Administration (State Archives of Assyria, 7), 1992. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2017, as part of the research programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich (Karen Radner, Humboldt Professorship 2015. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/P335793/..
Translation excerpted from Fales, F.M. & Postgate, J.N. 1992. Imperial Administrative Records, Part I: Palace and Temple Administration. SAA 7. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa07/P335793/.
Related tablets
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.