Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 312
About this tablet
This is a small Akkadian-period administrative tablet recording an allotment or delivery of barley to several named individuals, the first of whom, Kaku, is identified as a farmer. Five men receive shares of grain — most getting 5 gur each, two receiving only 1 gur — and the scribe totals the whole disbursement at the bottom: 22 gur of barley. Tablets like this are the routine bookkeeping of a Mesopotamian estate or temple household, tracking who received grain rations or seed allotments and how much, and they let historians reconstruct the workforce, pay scale, and administrative reach of Akkadian-period agriculture.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a barley account. Kaku the farmer received 5 gur of barley. Mes-e, Dugani, and Ur-zigumma each also received 5 gur. Ur-a received 1 gur, and a fifth person — whose name is partly broken and unreadable — received what was probably another 1 gur. The scribe added it all up: 22 gur of barley distributed in total, and the math checks out (5+5+5+5+1+1=22).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 gur barley: Kaku, the farmer. 5 (gur): Mes-e. 5 (gur): Dugani. 5 (gur): Ur-zigumma. 1 (gur): Ur-a. [1 (gur)]: ...za...(broken name). Total: 22 gur barley.
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
5(asz@c) sze gur ka#-ku3 engar 5(asz@c)# mes-e2 5(asz@c) du11#-ga-ni 5(asz@c)# ur-zigum-ma 1(asz@c) ur-a2 [1(asz@c)] x-za3#?-x szunigin 2(u@c) 2(asz@c) sze gur
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 312. 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 080 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from uncertain (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472612). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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