Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 209
About this tablet
This is a barley account from Adab (modern Bismaya) dating to the Akkadian period, roughly 2300–2200 BCE — one of the countless everyday ledgers kept by Mesopotamian temple or palace administrators. It records quantities of grain, measured in the standard capacity units gur and barig, credited to or disbursed among a list of named individuals, several of them apparently women (their names begin with the element 'Nin-', 'lady'). Adab has produced a substantial cache of such Akkadian-period grain accounts, giving historians a granular view of how institutional households tracked labor, rations, or dues at the level of individual people.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a grain ledger. It opens with a now-broken total figure of barley, then lists what different people received or supplied: Mama-ummi's entry (amount lost), 2 gur 2 barig for Nin-nigzu, 5 units for Aštar, 2 gur for Tani, 2 gur for Nin-adgal, 3 gur for Nig-banda, 2 gur for someone whose name is broken away, and finally 1 gur 2 barig either given to or received from a person named Menigin. In short: a simple bookkeeping tally of barley moving in or out of a household or storehouse, name by name.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n] gur of barley: Mama-ummi; 2 gur 2 barig: Nin-nigzu; 5 (units): Aštar; 2 gur: Tani; 2 gur: Nin-adgal; 3 gur: Nig-banda; 2 gur: Nin-[...] (name broken); 1 gur 2 barig: from Menigin.
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
[n] sze [gur] ma#-ma-um-mi# 2(asz@c) 2(barig@c) nin-nig2-zu 5(disz) asz#-dar# 2(asz@c) ta2-ni2 2(asz@c) () nin-ad2-gal 3(asz@c) nig2#-banda3 2(asz@c) nin#-[...] 1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) me-nigin3#-ta#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 209. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 312 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472509). 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.