Position in chronology
Lippmann Coll 327
About this tablet
This is a short administrative roster — a list of named individuals, each credited with a single unit (likely one head of livestock, or one person counted as a work-unit), closing with the summary term 'cowherds' that identifies the whole group's occupation or assignment. Such lists were routine bookkeeping in early Mesopotamian institutions (temple or palace households), tracking personnel or animals under named responsible parties. The names — Lugal-zi, Adda, Šeš-tur, Dudu, Aba-mu-ak, Lugal-ezem — are typical Early Dynastic-style Sumerian personal names, several of which recur across other tablets in this corpus.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a simple headcount list. Nine or ten men are named, each credited with one unit — Lugal-zi, Adda, Šeš-tur, two names now lost (one of them possibly Dudu), Aba-mu-ak, Lugal-ezem, and two more names too damaged to read. At the bottom, a single line sums up the whole group: they are cowherds. In other words, this is a roster of cattle-herders, each assigned to look after (or accounted for with) one animal or unit, kept by some institution's administration.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (unit): Lugal-zi 1 (unit): Adda 1 (unit): Šeš-tur 1 (unit): [name broken] 1 (unit): [name broken — ] Dudu [1 (unit):] Aba-mu-ak 1 (unit): Lugal-ezem 1 (unit): [...] 1 (unit): [...] (They are) cowherds.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
1(asz@c) lugal-zi 1(asz@c) ad-da 1(asz@c) szesz-tur 1(asz@c) () 1(asz@c) () du-du [1(asz@c)] a-ba-mu-ak 1(asz@c) lugal-ezem 1(asz@c)# x-[...] 1(asz@c) x-[...] unu3-me
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — Lippmann Coll 327. 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 061 (Carl L. Lippmann Collection, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain) — from uncertain (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P472627). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.