Position in chronology
MVN 03, 048
About this tablet
A short ration memo from Girsu, the great administrative centre of the Lagash state, written in the Sargonic (Old Akkadian) period around 2300–2200 BCE. It lists several grades of flour and some barley meant for soup, all booked as 'regular provisions', the fixed allotments an institution issued day by day or month by month. It is a small window onto the kitchen side of a Mesopotamian household: flours were carefully sorted by type and quality and measured down to fractions of a litre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Regular provisions: two barig of coarse barley flour, two ban and three sila of zi-gu flour, and four ban of top-quality flour for baking bread. An amount of za-tum flour and an amount of barley for making soup follow, but the figures for both are lost. The list ends with a third of a sila of zi-kum flour. All of it is booked as standard allotments.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 2 barig of dabin-flour, 2. 2 ban 3 sila of zi-gu flour, 3. 4 ban of first-quality flour for bread, 4. [...] of za-tum flour, 5. [...] barley for soup, 6. 1/3 (sila) of zi-kum flour: 7. regular provisions (sa-du).
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(barig@c) dabin 2(ban2@c) 3(disz) sila3 zi3-gu 4(ban2@c) zi3 sag ninda [...] zi3 za-tum# [...] sze tu7# igi 3(disz)-gal2 zi3 zi-kum sa2-du11
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — MVN 03, 048. 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 (P215702) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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