Position in chronology
OIP 092, 0404
About this tablet
A small ration receipt from the Persepolis Fortification archive — the vast bookkeeping of the Persian imperial heartland under Darius I, written in Elamite on clay. It records twenty units of flour drawn from a stock controlled by a man named Rašamadana and handed over to a man named Baduzirma, with a third man, Kurkaraš, involved in carrying out or authorising the handover, in the king's twentieth year (about 502 BCE). Thousands of such slips were kept at Persepolis to track food moving between storehouses, work gangs and travellers along the royal roads — the administrative bloodstream of the Achaemenid Empire.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Twenty measures of flour, issued from Rašamadana's stores, were received by Baduzirma; Kurkaraš handled the transaction. Dated to the twentieth regnal year. It is a one-line receipt of the kind Persepolis clerks wrote by the thousand — who supplied the grain, who took delivery, who signed off, and when.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine20 (quarts) of flour, the supply (kurmin) of Rašamadana; Baduzirma received (it). At/of Kurkaraš he performed (the transaction). Year 20 (of the king).
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
2(u) _zi3-da-mesz_ kur-min2 ra#-sa-ma-da-na ba-du-za-ir-ma du-isz-sza2 ku-ir-ka4-rasz2 ha hu-ut-tasz-da be-ul 2(u)-um-me-na
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Achaemenid (547-331 BC)) — OIP 092, 0404. 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, P383090). 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.