Position in chronology
MCS 4, 014 04
About this tablet
A fragment of an accounting tablet from the Old Akkadian period, roughly 2300–2200 BCE, now in the World Museum Liverpool. It lists measured amounts of barley — a gur is roughly 300 liters — issued to or owed by a series of named individuals, then closes with a grand total and the name of the responsible overseer, Kiti (who also appears as a recipient in the list). It is a scrap of the everyday grain bookkeeping that kept an Akkadian estate or institution running, with the top of the tablet broken away and several names lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a barley ledger. The opening entries are broken off, but the surviving lines read like a payroll: someone whose name ends in -muti, someone called -tebisir, then about 1.7 gur of barley for a man whose name is damaged, 1.4 gur for Inzu, 1.7 gur for Baruksir, 2 gur for Atiti, 1.7 gur for Kiti, and at least 1 gur for another person whose name is partly lost. The back of the tablet carried the sum — the readable part says '... 4 barig 2 ban of barley, in gur' — and signs off with the man in charge: 'foreman: Kiti.' The rest is blank or broken.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse — top broken) [...] ... [...]-muti, [...]-tebisir; 1 gur 4 barig — ...-ruk...; 1 gur 2 barig — Inzu; 1 gur 4 barig — Baruksir; 2 gur — Atiti; 1 gur 4 barig — Kiti; [n +] 1 gur — ...-imma; [...] ... . (Reverse) [Total: ... n gur] 4 barig 2 ban of barley, by the gur-measure, [...] ...-gar; foreman: Kiti. (Remainder of reverse uninscribed)
Our translation engine — Fable 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.
Engine notes
read from photo9 uncertain terms ↓
- asz@c, barig@c, ban2@c — Capacity measure signs written in the round/circular Akkadian style. 1 gur = 5 barig = 60 ban2 in standard Old Akkadian metrology, but local variants exist.
- ba-ru-uk-si-ir / x-ru-uk?-x — Likely a personal name (Akkadian); reading uncertain, especially the initial element in the broken line. Possibly Baruksir or similar.
- in-zu — Personal name; possibly Sumerian or Akkadian hypocoristic. Could relate to the divine name Sîn (dEN.ZU) used as a personal name element.
- a2-ti-ti — Personal name; reading and etymology uncertain.
- ki-ti — Personal name appearing both as a recipient (line 8) and as the named foreman (ugula) in the final line; may be the same individual or a coincidence of similar names.
- ugula# — Sumerian 'overseer / foreman'; the # indicates the sign is partially preserved on the tablet.
- mul — Possibly 'star' (Sumerian) or a personal name element or commodity; context is broken and unclear.
- im-ma — Could be a personal name element, a commodity (clay?), or a verb form; context is too broken to determine.
- x-gar3 — Broken; gar3 could mean 'place/deposit' or be part of a name; the preceding sign is illegible.
Reasoning ↓
Visual examination of the main tablet face (central upper image) shows a clay tablet fragment, roughly triangular due to breakage at the lower left. The surface preserves moderately clear horizontal ruling lines separating entries, consistent with an administrative/account document. Wedge impressions are visible in several rows and largely legible in the upper portion, becoming less clear and more damaged toward the lower right. I can confirm the presence of large capacity signs (round-formed numerals typical of the Akkadian period, using the circular and semi-circular impressed signs for gur/barig values) in rows 4–9, consistent with the transliteration's 1(asz@c), 2(asz@c), 4(barig@c) notations. The word-signs following the numerals are harder to verify individually at this resolution but several multi-wedge sign clusters are consistent with personal names or commodity designations as transliterated. The bottom portion of the reverse (lower images) shows only two or three lines of text, heavily abraded, which corresponds to the sparse final lines of the transliteration. The transliteration 'ugula# ki-ti' in the final line is consistent with a typical Akkadian-period administrative closing line naming an overseer. The '#' on ugula indicates partial preservation, which matches the observed surface wear. No significant discrepancies between photo and transliteration were detected, though several broken/unclear signs (marked x in the transliteration) cannot be independently resolved from the photograph. This appears to be a grain or commodity allocation list, probably Old Akkadian, recording measured amounts of barley (sze) in gur and barig units distributed to or associated with named individuals, under the oversight of a foreman (ugula) named ki-ti.
Generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 · prompt 2026-05-11/v3-conventions · May 11, 2026 · 3130 in / 1035 out tokens
Transliteration
[...] x [...]-mu-ti [...]-te-bi-si-ir 1(asz@c) 4(barig@c) x-ru-uk?-x 1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) in-zu 1 (asz) 4(barig) ba-ru-uk-si-ir 2(asz@c) a2-ti-ti 1(asz@c) 4(barig@c) ki-ti n 1(asz@c) x im-ma [...] mul [...] n 4(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) sze gur [...] x-gar3 ugula# ki-ti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MCS 4, 014 04. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: World Museum Liverpool, Liverpool, UK (P112758) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.