Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 135
About this tablet
An administrative tablet from the Akkadian period at Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), recording the delivery of two pairs of specifically named garment types to the city governor. A named official, Ur-Šupa-sikil, is identified as the person who issued the cloth. This is the kind of daily textile record that palace and temple archives across ancient Mesopotamia generated in enormous quantities — tracking who made cloth, who authorized it, and who received it. Only the opening entries and the start of a closing summary survive; the full total has broken away.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two garments of the šagadu type and two garments of the šage-dab type were given to the governor. Ur-Šupa-sikil is the one who gave them to him. The tablet then begins a running total — something like 'Grand total: [n] garments of various kinds' — but the number is lost in a gap, and the rest of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 garments of šagadu-type — [for the] governor 2 garments of šage-dab-type — [for the] governor Ur-Šupa-sikil gave to him [Total: n garment(s),] various [...]
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
2(asz@c)# tug2 sza3-ga-du3 ensi2 2(asz@c) tug2 sza3-ge-dab6 ensi2 ur-su3-pa-sikil e-na-[szum2] [szunigin n tug2?] hi#?-a [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 135. 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 235 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472435). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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