Position in chronology
MVN 03, 047
About this tablet
A small expenditure record from the provincial administration at Girsu (modern Tello, southern Iraq) in the Sargonic period, around 2300 BCE, when the Akkad kings ruled Sumer. It records how much bread was baked from a given amount of flour, with the baking rate written out, together with a few jars of beer, and links the bread to a man named Ur-Bagara. The arithmetic checks: 69 sila of flour at two loaves per sila gives exactly 138 loaves. It shows the careful flour-to-bread accounting that kept state kitchens honest.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
138 loaves of bread were baked at a rate of 20 loaves per ban of flour, which used up 69 sila of flour. The entry is booked under Ur-Bagara. Three jars of beer and one gur₄-gur₄ vessel also went out, for the city. All of it is recorded as expended.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse (no section labels in the source; the six lines are rendered in order) 1. 138 (lit. 140 minus 2) loaves of bread, baked at 20 (per ban), 2. their flour: 1 barig 1 ban minus 1 sila (= 69 sila); 3. Ur-Bagara. 4. 3 jars of beer, 1 gur₄-gur₄ vessel; 5. (for/in) the city. 6. Expended.
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
2(gesz2) 2(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) ninda 2(u) du8 zi3-bi 1(barig@c) 1(ban2@c) la2 1(disz) sila3 ur-ba-gara2 3(asz@c) kasz dug 1(asz@c) gur4-gur4 iri-ki zi-ga
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MVN 03, 047. 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: Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P215701) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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