MAD 5, 019

About this tablet

A short personnel list from Kish in northern Babylonia, written in the time of the Akkadian empire (around 2300–2150 BCE). It names six workmen, five of them with Semitic names honouring the gods Ea and Suen (the moon-god), and records them all as fugitives, men who had run away from their labour duty. Their foreman, Mututu, heads the list himself, so the whole work-gang may have absconded together. Small records like this show how closely state labour was tracked, and that flight was one way workers resisted it.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

This is a list of six men: Mututu, Salim-aḫu, Kibutum, Galab-Ea, Išma-Suen and Išim-Ea, one person each. All six are workmen who have run away. Their foreman is Mututu, who is also first on the list.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Medium confidence

1 Mututu 1 Salim-aḫu 1 Kibutum 1 Galab-Ea 1 Išma-Suen 1 Išim-Ea Total: 6 runaway workmen; foreman: Mututu.

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 — Opus 5.5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.

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Transliteration

1(asz@c) mu-tu-tu
1(asz@c) sa2-lim-a-hu
1(asz@c) ki-bu-tum
1(asz@c) ga-la-ab-e2-a
1(asz@c) isz-ma2-suen
1(asz@c) i-szim-e2-a
szu-nigin2 6(asz@c) gurusz zah3
ugula mu-tu-tu

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 5, 019. 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: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P215346) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).

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