Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 157
About this tablet
An administrative inventory from the city of Adab in southern Iraq, dating to the Akkadian period (roughly 2300–2150 BCE). It records the deposit of timber and wooden pegs into the city's main storehouse, carefully distinguishing between new and old long poles, replacement or recycled stock, and two grades of pegs — standard ones and a batch noted as defective because they lack pointed tips. The tablet is dated by its closing month name to the barley-harvest season. The precision of these quality categories illustrates the meticulous resource management that kept Mesopotamian institutional storehouses functioning.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The storehouse of accumulated goods has received the following: 35 long timber poles, new (the exact count is slightly uncertain due to a damaged sign); 31 long timber poles, old — some of those logged as replacement stock. There are also 37 stripped or plain timbers, 240 wooden pegs, and 60 more pegs that are blunted and have no usable tip. All of this has been entered into the record. Date: the month of the barley harvest.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine35[?] long timbers — new wood. 31 long timbers — old wood; wood [given as] replacement. 37 stripped timbers. 240 pegs. 60 pegs without tips. [Deposited in] the storehouse of accumulated goods: on record. Month: barley-harvest.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
3(u@c)# 5(asz@c) gesz-gid2-da gesz gibil 3(u@c) 1(asz@c) gesz-gid2-da gesz libir-am3 gesz sa gi4-am3 4(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) gesz-su3 4(gesz2@c) gag 1(gesz2@c) gag igi nu-tuku e2-nig2-gur11-ra mu-gal2 iti sze-sag11-ku5
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 157. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 049 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472457). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.