Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 119
About this tablet
A compact wool-delivery receipt from Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), dating to the Akkadian period, roughly 2350–2150 BCE. It records that five talents and seven minas of wool — a substantial quantity, over three hundred minas — were deposited into the city's main storehouse as the property of the governor, with a man named Lugal-amu responsible for weighing the goods out. The closing line stamps the transaction with a calendar month. Tablets like this are the everyday paperwork of Mesopotamian redistributive economy: commodities tracked as they passed between officials and institutional storerooms.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Five talents and seven minas of wool have been brought into the storehouse. The wool belongs to the governor. Lugal-amu weighed it out on his behalf. Dated to the month of Du₆-kù.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 talents (and) 7 minas of wool — wool that was brought into the storehouse (é-níg-gur₁₁-ra); it is the governor's wool. Lugal-amu weighed it out for him. Month: Du₆-kù.
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
5(asz@c) siki# gu2 7(disz) ma-na siki e2-nig2-gur11-ra kux(KWU636)-ra2-am3 siki ensi2-kam lugal-a-mu e-na-la2 iti du6-ku3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 119. 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 108 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472419). 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.