Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 096
About this tablet
A terse sale or transfer record from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, written during the Akkadian period (roughly 2350–2150 BCE). Two goods change hands — a jar of sesame oil and a garment — each valued in silver shekels, the standard medium of exchange in ancient Mesopotamia. The named party is a scribe called Lugal-itida, identified by his professional title before his personal name. Tablets like this are the mundane paperwork of urban commerce, preserving in clay the going price of oil and cloth in a city that was already over a thousand years old when this record was made.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
One jar of sesame oil, worth 2 shekels of silver. One garment — the precise type is damaged and unclear — worth half a shekel of silver. The scribe Lugal-itida is identified as the key party; someone gave these items to him (or he gave them to another person — the tablet names him but leaves the giver unstated). A brief, businesslike record of a two-item transaction, the kind of everyday paperwork that kept the temples and merchants of ancient Adab running.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 jar of sesame oil — its price: 2 shekels of silver; 1 garment of [nig2-su] type — its price: ½ shekel of silver. His title: scribe — Lugal-itida. (He/she) gave [it] to him.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(asz@c) i3-gesz dug nig2-sa10-bi# 2(disz) ku3 gin2 1(asz@c) tug2 nig2-su#?-[a?] nig2-sa10-bi# 1/2(disz) ku3 [gin2] mu-ni dub#-[sar] lugal-iti#-[da] e-na-szum2#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 096. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 241 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472396). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
Related tablets
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.