Position in chronology
OIP 092, 0039
About this tablet
A small administrative receipt from the Persepolis Fortification archive, the vast bookkeeping system of the Persian Empire under Darius I. Written in Elamite, it records that a named official, Pirriašba, took delivery of a thousand measures of tarmu-grain brought in from the village of Zakzaku, in the king's nineteenth year (about 503 BCE). Thousands of such memoranda tracked the flow of food and rations across the imperial heartland around Persepolis — the everyday paperwork behind a world empire.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: 1,000 measures of tarmu grain, transported from Zakzaku (under the responsibility of Šur-sunkiri). Received by Pirriašba. Year 19 of the king's reign. In other words, a warehouse clerk near Persepolis is signing off on a large grain shipment brought in from an outlying settlement, logging who handled it, who took delivery, and the regnal year — nothing more, nothing less.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 1,000 (measures of) tarmu-grain, carried from Zakzaku, (under) Šur-sunkiri(?): Pirriašba received (it). (Year formula) 19th year.
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
_1(disz) lim#_ tar-mu za-ak-za-ku-mar# szu#-ur-_eszszana_-ri ku-ut-ka4 pir2-ri-asz2-ba du-isz-da be-ul 1(u) 9(disz@v)-me-na#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Achaemenid (547-331 BC)) — OIP 092, 0039. 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, P382725). 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.