Position in chronology
OIP 092, 0036
About this tablet
An administrative memorandum from the Persepolis Fortification archive, the vast filing system of the Achaemenid Persian court, written in Elamite. It records a single transaction: nearly three hundred measures of tarmu — a cereal usually identified as emmer wheat — issued from the stores of an official named Ḫumuštimana and taken in hand by a man named Ummanunu, in the 20th year of the reign (almost certainly Darius I, about 502 BCE). Tens of thousands of such slips tracked every ration of grain, wine, and livestock moving through the imperial heartland — the everyday bookkeeping that kept the Persian Empire fed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: 292 measures of emmer wheat. Source of supply: Ḫumuštimana's allocation. Ummanunu took delivery and carried it off. Filed in year 20 of the king's reign. In effect, a warehouse chit — one clerk signing grain out of another official's stock, dated and archived so the accounts would balance at Persepolis.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine292 (units of) tarmu-grain (emmer), allocation (kurmin) of Ḫumuštimana. Ummanunu received (it and) delivered it. Year 20.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
_2(disz) me_ 1(gesz2) 3(u) 2(disz) tar#-mu#-_mesz#_ kur-min2 hu-musz#-ti-ma-na um#-ma-nu!-nu! ku-iz-da kur-du-isz-szu!-um be-ul 2(u)-me-na
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Achaemenid (547-331 BC)) — OIP 092, 0036. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: OIM L— (PFAP, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA) — from Pārśa (mod. Persepolis) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P382722). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.