Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 156
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Adab, dating to the Akkadian period, recording a handful of named individuals — some linked to a temple administrator (sanga) of a local institution called Asz8-gi4. The record closes with a brief distributional verb ('gave it') and a month date, the standard closing formula for this kind of transaction. Such tablets were the everyday paperwork of provincial temple administration under the Akkadian empire: tracking who received what, under whose authority, and when. The tablet is unfortunately damaged at several key points, leaving the nature of the items or obligations being tracked unclear.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet lists a group of people — Ur-e2-dam, Lu-dun-a, and Ur-a2 — alongside a temple administrator attached to the Asz8-gi4 institution. Also recorded are Ha-zi-gula, someone whose name begins Lugal- and ends in -zi (the middle sign is lost), a second person named Ha-zi, and someone called Urua. At the top, one individual or item is described with a damaged term that may relate to a weapon or implement 'set in order.' Whoever the responsible official was, the tablet records that he or she gave all of this out. The transaction took place in the month of Du6-ku3. The damaged portions of the text cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 [item/person] — tukul[(?)], [set right(?)], Ur-e2-dam, Lu-dun-a, Ur-a2; 1 temple administrator (sanga) of Asz8-gi4; [1?] Ha-zi-gula, Lugal-[x]-zi; 1 Ha-zi, Urua — he/she gave it to him/her. Month: Du6-ku3 (the Holy Mound).
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
1(asz@c) tukul# si#?-sa2 ur-e2-dam# lu2-dun-a ur#-a2 1(asz@c) sanga asz8-gi4 [1(asz@c)?] ha#-zi# gu-la# lugal#-x-zi# 1(asz@c) ha-zi urua e-ne-szum2 iti du6-ku3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 156. 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 229 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472456). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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