Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 214
About this tablet
This is an administrative tablet from the Sargonic (Akkadian) period, likely from Adab, recording batches of woven cloaks (a garment type called bar-dul5) along with their total weights, each entry attributed to a named individual. Such records were part of the routine bookkeeping of textile workshops, where officials tracked the output of weavers in bundles of ten and logged the weight of wool or finished cloth against the person responsible — whether an overseer, a weaver, or a recipient. Tablets like this one give historians precise, if unglamorous, insight into the scale and organization of state or temple textile production in third-millennium Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This record logs three batches of cloaks, ten in each batch, made by weavers. The first ten cloaks weigh 47 minas total and are logged under Nin-ikuša. The second ten weigh 35 minas, credited to Šu-imduga. The third ten weigh 36 minas, credited to Kešmen. It reads like a warehouse tally sheet — quantities, weights, and the names of the people accountable for each lot.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 bar-dul5 cloaks, weaver's work, their weight: 50 minus 3 (= 47 minas) — Nin-ikuša. 10 bar-dul5 cloaks, weaver's work, weight: 35 (minas) — Šu-imduga. 10 bar-dul5 cloaks, weaver's work, their weight: 36 (minas) — Kešmen.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(u) bar-dul5 usz-bar ki-la2#-bi# 5(u) la2 3(disz@t) nin-i3-kusz2 1(u) bar-dul5 usz-bar ki-la2 3(u) 5(disz@t) szu-im-du11-ga 1(u) bar-dul5 usz-bar ki-la2-bi 3(u) 6(disz@t) kesz3-men
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 214. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 166 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) ? — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472514). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (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.