Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 205
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tablet from Adab, dated to the Akkadian period, recording an inventory of textiles — two distinct garment types (nig-la2 'hanging/wrap' cloths and shagadu cloths) sorted by quality grade and by whether they had been 'delivered' or accounted for. It closes with a summary line drawing the total from a larger stock. Such tablets were the everyday bookkeeping of a textile workshop or storehouse, the kind of granular inventory control that let Mesopotamian institutions track cloth production and distribution centuries before coinage existed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a stock list for textiles. Seventeen 'nig-la2' wraps are recorded as top quality, and another sixteen of the same type are noted as delivered or processed. Two more nig-la2 cloths are logged as a donkey-load (a bundle for transport). The next line, mentioning a storehouse, is too damaged to read fully. Then the tally turns to 'shagadu' cloths: an unknown number are top quality (the number is broken away), and fourteen more are marked delivered. The tablet ends with a line meaning 'from the total' — signaling that these figures were drawn from, and checked against, a larger master account.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine17 nig-la2 garments, fine quality. 16 nig-la2 garments, delivered (accounted for). 2 nig-la2 garments, a donkey-load (bale). [...] the storehouse/house [...] [n shagadu] garments, fine quality. 14 shagadu garments, delivered (accounted for). From the total.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) tug2# nig2-la2# saga 1(u@c) 6(asz@c) tug2 nig2-la2 mu-du11-ga 2(asz@c) tug2 nig2-la2 gu2# ansze [...] e2# [...] [n tug2 sza3]-ga#-du3 saga# 1(u@c) 4(asz@c) tug2 sza3-ga-du3 mu-du11# me-nigin3-ta
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 205. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 319 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472505). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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Related sources
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.