Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 025
About this tablet
A small disbursement record from the ancient city of Adab in southern Iraq, dating to the Akkadian period (roughly 2350–2150 BCE). A storehouse administrator has itemized several garments of different types and grades — including fine-quality cloth and two other named varieties — together with a small jar of good oil and a quantity of bitumen, all released on someone's official order. Tablets like this are the everyday paperwork of Mesopotamian palace and temple economies: terse, precise, and enormously useful to historians mapping how goods moved from storeroom to recipient. Thousands of such records survive, and together they allow modern scholars to reconstruct the surprisingly complex logistics of ancient institutional life.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is an itemized delivery record. It begins with an uncertain number of garments of the nāsparu type (the count is damaged and lost). Then: two fine-grade garments of second quality; two šagadu garments of second quality; two šage-dab garments. Also issued: one small jar of good oil measuring one sila (roughly one liter), and one unit of bitumen allocated to a household or building. The closing note records that all of this was dispatched on official orders and delivered to its recipient — though the last line is only partially preserved and the exact wording is uncertain.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n] garment(s), nāsparu type 2 garments, fine-grade (nig₂-lam₂), second quality 2 garments, šagadu type, second quality 2 garments, šage-dab type 1 (jar of) good oil, 1-sila measure 1 (unit of) bitumen, house-allocation his/her command: [was given to him?]
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
[n tug2] na#-[as]-pa2#-ru 2(asz@c) tug2 nig2-lam2 us2 2(asz@c) tug2 sza3-ga-du3 us2 2(asz@c) tug2 sza3-ge#-dab6# 1(asz@c) i3 du10-ga nig2-1(disz@t)-sila3 1(asz@c) esir4# e2#-ba# du11#-ga#-ni# [e-na-szum2?]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 025. 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 136 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472325). 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.