Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 224
About this tablet
This is a small administrative receipt from the city of Adab, dating to the Akkadian (Sargonic) period, roughly the 23rd century BCE. It records a quantity of bronze metal and seven nails weighed out by a smith named Dada for delivery to Lugal-amu, a priest of the storm-god Iškur, with the transaction dated by month. Texts like this — terse, formulaic weight-and-metal accounts — are common from the palace and temple workshops of Sargonic Adab, and they let historians reconstruct how metal moved between craftsmen and religious institutions in one of the earliest bureaucratic states.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A batch of bronze weighing just under some number of minas (two shekels short of the round figure) and seven nails were weighed out and logged. The metal went to Lugal-amu, the priest in charge of the Iškur temple. Dada the smith did the weighing and handed it over. Recorded in the month of Abe'eziga.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n and] 1/3 mina minus 2 shekels of bronze; 7 nails. Its total was recorded (set down). [For] Lugal-amu, [the temple administrator] of Iškur; Dada, the smith, weighed it out to him. Month: Abe'eziga.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[n] 1/3(asz@c) ma-na la2 2(disz@t) gin2 zabar-uruda 7(asz@c) gag gu2-ba ab-gar [x] lugal-a-mu [sanga] iszkur-kam da#-da# simug e-na-la2 [iti] ab-e3-zi#-ga-am3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 224. 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 316 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472524). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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