Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 068
About this tablet
An administrative tablet from the Akkadian period (roughly 2350–2150 BCE), almost certainly from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, recording allocations of garlic to two named individuals: Da-da and Ur-Enlil. The tablet uses the sexagesimal counting system standard in Mesopotamian bookkeeping, and one entry registers a shortfall — 20 allocated, 2 still outstanding, giving a net of 18. Garlic was a staple of the Mesopotamian diet and a routine commodity tracked by temple and palace administrators. Tablets like this are the paper trail of an ancient economy: precise, impersonal, and occasionally humanised by the personal names of the officials who handled the goods.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Da-da's account shows 75 portions of garlic rations, plus a separate entry of 18 portions (20 allocated, 2 short) designated for workers. Ur-Enlil's account records 134 portions of garlic rations. The tablet ends there; nothing further is preserved.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine75 (units of) garlic-rations; 18 (= 20 minus 2) garlic [for] persons — Da-da; 134 (units of) garlic-rations — Ur-[Enlil].
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(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) szum2-ti 2(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) szum2-tu-lu2 da-da 2(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 4(asz@c) szum2-ti ur#-en-lil2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 068. 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 015 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) ? — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472368). 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.