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.
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. No scholarly translation has been published; 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).
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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.