Position in chronology
OAIC 03
About this tablet
A short Old Akkadian legal record from Ešnunna (Tell Asmar, east of modern Baghdad), written around 2300–2150 BCE. It names five witnesses, then records a payment of one barig of barley from a man called Gi-nunu to a man called Dar-etum. The last line names a slave woman, Ibbubu, so this is probably the price paid in a slave transaction, though the tablet never spells that link out. It shows how ordinary private deals were witnessed and written down under the Akkadian empire.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Witnesses: Egi (Tabsiga's man), Ešdar-šadu, Warad-Inanna, and Mašum son of Maštum. Gi-nunu paid Dar-etum one barig of barley, about 60 liters. The slave woman concerned is Ibbubu.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. Egi, 2. the one of Tabsiga; 3. Ešdar-šadu; 4. Warad-Inanna; 5. Mašum, 6. son of Maštum: 7. the witnesses. 1 barig of barley 8. Gi-nunu 9. to Dar-etum 10. gave. 11. Female slave: Ibbubu.
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
e-gi szu tab-si-ga esz18-dar-sa-du2 ARAD2-inanna ma-szum _dumu_ masz-tum _abba2_ 1(barig) _sze_ gi-nu-nu a-na dar-e-tum i-di3-na _geme2_ ib-bu-bu
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OAIC 03. 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: Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA (P215875) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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