Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 279
About this tablet
This is a small administrative list of female workers (geme2) from Adab, dating to the Akkadian (Sargonic) period, roughly the late third millennium BCE. Each line records a quantity — usually one, but two and three in the last entries — followed by a personal name or a category label. Texts like this were part of the routine bookkeeping of large households or institutions that tracked female labor for rations, work assignments, or corvée duty; this fragment likely once belonged to a longer roster or ration list.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet lists female laborers by name, one entry per line, evidently part of a household or institutional roster. It records: one worker named Mama-ummi; one named Geme-Enlil; one named Aštar; one named Tani; one named Nin-adgal; two workers grouped under the name (or title) Nin-nigzu; and three workers listed simply under the category 'nig2-banda3,' likely a term for junior or subordinate staff rather than individual names. No totals or further context (such as rations issued or a supervising official) survive on this fragment.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 female worker: Mama-ummi. 1 female worker: Geme-Enlil. 1 female worker: Aštar. 1 female worker: Tani. 1 female worker: Nin-adgal. 2 female workers: Nin-nigzu. 3 (workers): nig2-banda3 (subordinate/junior personnel).
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(asz@c) geme2 ma-ma-um-mi 1(asz@c) geme2-en-lil2 1(asz@c) asz-dar 1(asz@c) ta2-ni2 1(asz@c) nin-ad2-gal 2(asz@c)# nin-nig2-zu 3(asz@c) nig2-banda3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 279. 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 081 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472579). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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