Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 232
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tablet from the city of Adab, dating to the Akkadian period (roughly 2300–2200 BCE). It records a delivery or receipt of garlic or onions — sixty-four units weighing about sixteen and a half minas, four shekels — credited to a man named Dada who worked as a smith. Tablets like this were the everyday bookkeeping of Mesopotamian institutions, tracking commodities in and out of storerooms and workshops, month by month, so that officials could verify what had been given and to whom.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a receipt: 64 units of garlic or onion, weighing 16 and a half minas and 4 shekels, were handed over and accounted for. The recipient was Dada, a metalsmith. The transaction was recorded in the month known as 'barley-harvest.'
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine64 (units of) garlic/onion — its weight: 16 1/2 minas, 4 shekels. Received (lit. 'returned to hand'). Dada, the smith. Month: 'barley-harvest' (sze-sag11-ku5).
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
1(gesz2@c) 4(asz@c) szum ki-la2-bi 1(u@c) 6(asz@c) 1/2(asz@c) ma-na 4(disz) gin2 szu-a gi4-a da#-da () simug-kam iti sze-sag11-ku5
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 232. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CL 093 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472532). 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.