Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 172
About this tablet
This is a fragmentary administrative account, likely from Adab during the Akkadian (Sargonic) period, listing quantities of goods moving through an institutional household — dates measured out in standard containers, garments produced by a weaver, agricultural implements, fish for a table (perhaps a cultic offering table), and wagon-loads of goods along with bronze and copper items. Such tablets were the bookkeeping of temple or palace storehouses, tracking what came in, what was disbursed, and to whom — the mundane paperwork that kept an ancient economy running. The tablet is broken at both ends, so we are missing the header naming the officials or occasion, and the closing summary.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving lines are a stretch of an inventory list. It records 68 dates packed in standard 3-ban2 containers, two garments of the 'igi-dim' type and some 'bar-dul5' cloth credited to a weaver, ten hoes, and then forty units of something now illegible. After a gap, the text resumes with fifty fish set aside for an offering table, two cartloads of goods delivered to (or from) a place or office called the 'house of allotment,' and ten items described as bronze and copper — possibly tool-heads or fittings. The beginning and a middle section of the tablet are broken away, so we don't know who compiled this account or for what larger purpose.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 68 dates (measured in) gurdub-containers of 3 ban2 (each) 2 igi-dim garments, bar-dul5 (garments), (from) the weaver 10 hoes 40 [...] (illegible) [...] 50 fish, (for) the offering table 2 wagon-loads of goods — the 'house of allotment' 10 pa-nig2(?), (of) bronze (and) copper
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. 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
[...] 1(gesz2@c) 8(asz@c) zu2-lum gurdub 3(ban2@c) 2(asz@c) tug2 igi-dim bar-dul5 usz-bar 1(u@c) al 4(u@c)# x x [...] 5(u@c)# ku6# banszur 2(asz@c) gigir2-nig2-szu e2-ba 1(u@c) pa-nig2? zabar-uruda
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 172. 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 289 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) ? — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472472). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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