Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 151
About this tablet
An administrative tablet from the ancient city of Adab in southern Iraq, dating to the Akkadian period (roughly 2350–2100 BCE). It tracks three installments of goods — sheep hides and professionally woven cloaks — delivered to and registered at the city's main treasury in the month of Ab-e3. This is the routine bookkeeping of a palace or temple redistributive economy: commodities arrive in batches, a scribe logs each lot with a running installment count, and the entry is formally closed with the month name. The preservation of this kind of granular batch accounting from Adab is historically valuable, since the city's archives shed rare light on how Akkadian-period institutions managed textiles and raw animal products alongside one another.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Three separate deliveries are logged here. The first batch consisted of roughly twenty-plus sheep hides; the second, twenty-nine hides. The third delivery — whose precise tally of hides is partly damaged — also included sixty-four woven cloaks produced by a weaver. All of these goods were brought into the treasury and officially entered into the records. The whole account is dated to the month of Ab-e3, and this entry marks the third installment.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[20+n] sheep hide(s) — 1st time; 29 hide(s) — 2nd [time]; [n+]2 sheep hide(s); 64 bar-dul5 garments — weaver(s); [at] the treasury: is registered. Month: Ab-e3. 3rd time.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
2(u@c)# n kusz# udu# a-ra2 1(disz)-kam 3(u@c)# la2 1(asz@c) kusz [a]-ra2# 2(disz) [n] 2(asz@c) kusz# udu 1(gesz2@c) 4(asz@c) bar-dul5 usz-bar e2-nig2-gur11-ra mu-gal2 iti ab-e3 a-ra2# 3(disz)-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 151. 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 153 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472451). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
Related tablets
Related sources
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