Position in chronology
MAD 5, 073
About this tablet
A short administrative account from the Old Akkadian period (around 2300 BCE), probably from the small site of Umm al-Jir in central Babylonia. It is a stock list of brewing and household supplies: white barley, chickpeas, beer-bread and malt — the raw materials of Mesopotamian beer — followed by counted items including palm-frond ribs and wooden implements. Tablets like this are the routine bookkeeping of an estate or institution, showing how even modest households tracked their provisions in writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
An inventory slip: roughly two measures of white barley (the exact figure is partly broken), one barig of large pulses such as chickpeas, one barig of beer-bread cakes, and two barig of malt — everything needed for brewing. Then come counted goods: twenty palm-frond ribs, five šulīpum-items, four pieces of bubu-wood, and two kum-objects. In short, a clerk's tally of foodstuffs and materials on hand or being issued.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 2(aš)? [n (gur of)] white barley, 2. 1 barig of large pulses (chickpeas), 3. 1 barig of beer-bread, 4. 2 barig of malt, 5. 20 zinatum (palm-frond ribs), 6. 5 šulīpum, 7. 4 bubu-wood (implements), 8. 2 kum.
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
2(asz@c)#? [n sze] babbar2 1(barig@c) gu2-gu2 gal-gal 1(barig@c) bappir 2(barig@c) munu4 2(u@c) zi-na-tum 5(asz@c) szu-li-pum 4(asz@c) gesz-bu3-bu3 2(asz@c) kum
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 5, 073. 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 (P215396) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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