Position in chronology
MAD 5, 072
About this tablet
A small Old Akkadian (Sargonic-period, c. 2300 BCE) sale record from central Babylonia, probably from the site now called Umm al-Jir. It documents two payments: a man named Edamu accepted silver and barley as the price of his own son, Ali-ahu — almost certainly a child sale driven by debt or hardship — and a second person, Gubatum, accepted four gur of barley as the price of a field. Such terse receipts are among our earliest windows onto how land and even people changed hands for grain and silver in early Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a receipt covering two transactions. In the first, Edamu received a quantity of silver (the exact number of shekels is broken away) along with an amount of barley, measured in the standard large gur, as the purchase price of his son Ali-ahu. In the second, Gubatum received four gur of barley — roughly a thousand liters — as the purchase price of a field. The top of the tablet is damaged, so the opening quantities are partly lost, but the structure of both payments is clear.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n shekels of silver] [...] barley (measured by the) sag-gal (gur), [E]damu received, (as) the price of his son, Ali-ahu. 4 gur of barley (by the sag-gal gur) Gubatum, for the price of a field, received.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[n _ku3-babbar] gin2_ [...] _sze sag-gal2_ [e2]-da-mu im-hur _sa10 dumu_-su a-li-a-hu 4(asz@c) _sze sag-gal2_ gu-ba-tum a-na _sa10 GAN2_ tam2-hur
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 5, 072. 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 (P215395) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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