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 engine

Medium confidence

64 (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).

Indicative reading — translated without a photograph. Generated from the transliteration alone, without examining the original. Read it as an accessible first taste, not as a verified catalogue entry.

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. 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 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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