Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 023
About this tablet
An Old Akkadian administrative record from Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), probably dating to around 2300–2150 BCE. The tablet lists a small but varied collection of luxury and household goods — a silver ring with its weight noted, three named types of garment, a measure of sweet oil, bitumen for the storehouse, and a quantity of barley linked to Agade, the Akkadian imperial capital. The mixture of Sumerian vocabulary with an Akkadian-inflected garment term (naspārum, with its characteristic -um nominative ending) is a textbook marker of the Old Akkadian administrative style, when both languages operated side by side in the same records. The tablet is too damaged to identify the recipient or the occasion, but it reads like a disbursement docket for a named individual or institution — a moment of everyday accounting from the heart of the world's first empire.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The record lists: one silver spiral ring weighing one-third of a shekel; one garment of the naspārum type; one heavy, finely finished garment; one fine garment in ušbar-weave; one one-sila3 jar of sweet oil; an uncertain quantity of bitumen designated for the storehouse; and an uncertain number of gur-measures of barley destined for (or received from) Agade. The final lines are too broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[1] silver ring, spiral, its weight: 1/3 (shekel) 1 garment of naspārum-type 1 heavy garment, perfectly finished 1 fine garment, ušbar-weave 1 [1-sila3 vessel of] sweet oil [n unit(s) of] bitumen, house-[allotment] [n] gur of barley, (for/at) Agade [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. 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
[1(asz@c)] ku3# har# hu#-[la] ki#-la2#-bi# 1/3(asz@c)# 1(asz@c) tug2# na#-as#-[pa2]-ru#-um# 1(asz@c) tug2# kal#-ga szu du7#-[a] 1(asz@c) tug2 nig2-lam2 usz-bar 1(asz@c) i3 du10-ga nig2-[1(disz@t)-sila3] [n] esir5 e2-[ba] [n] sze gur a-ga#-de3 [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 023. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 298 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472323). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.