Position in chronology
MAD 5, 077
About this tablet
A piece of everyday accounting from the Akkadian (Sargonic) period, around 2300 BCE, probably from the site of Umm al-Jir in central Iraq. A scribe records amounts of barley going out to three named individuals — one lot for consumption, one measured in the standard gur, and one explicitly labelled as loan barley, meaning it carried an obligation of repayment with interest. It is a small window onto ancient credit: temples and households routinely lent grain to be repaid at harvest.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
An outgoing grain ledger: roughly 3 barig and 2 ban of barley went to a man whose name is partly broken (Mu-...-sa-...); 2 barig and 2 ban of barley, earmarked for consumption, went to Aḫrium; and 4 gur 3 barig of barley, measured by the standard sag-gal gur, went to Banium. The entry notes that this is loan barley — grain advanced as a debt to be repaid with interest. The whole disbursement was booked out under the responsibility of Bēlī-bara.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 3 barig 2 ban of <barley> — Mu-[...]-sa-[...]; 2. 2 barig 2 ban of barley for consumption — 3. Aḫrium; 4. 4 (gur) 3 barig of barley in the sag-gal (gur-measure) — 5. Banium. 6. Barley of the (interest-bearing) loan. 7. Bēlī-bara: 8. expended (issued).
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
3(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) _<sze>_ mu#-[...]-sa-[...] 2(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) _sze gu7#_ ah-ri2-um 4(asz@c) 3(barig@c) _sze sag-gal2_ ba-ni-um _sze_ hu-bu-lim be-li2-bara2 _e3_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MAD 5, 077. 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 (P215400) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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