Position in chronology
OAIC 16
About this tablet
A small Old Akkadian account from Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar in the Diyala region of Iraq), roughly 2300–2200 BCE. It is a bare list of people identified by their trades — a merchant, a shepherd, a fuller, a bronze-worker, a servant and a woman named only as someone's wife — followed by a single quantity of barley marked as settled. It is probably a memorandum of persons involved in a transaction, perhaps witnesses or recipients, from an early moment when Akkadian rather than Sumerian was becoming the language of everyday record-keeping.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This note records a handful of people: the wife of Ilī-karābī; Šaḫu, who works for Sāmiš; Dingir-azu, a merchant; Eštar-alsu, who herds sheep; Amariš, who cleans and finishes cloth; and Bāni, who works in bronze. At the end it enters one barig of barley — about 60 liters — and marks it as fully paid or settled. That is the whole text; there is no further explanation of what the people had to do with the barley.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. the wife of Ilī-karābī; 2. Šaḫu, 3. servant of Sāmiš; 4. Dingir-azu, the merchant; 5. Eštar-alsu, 6. the shepherd of sheep; 7. Amariš, the fuller; 8. Bāni, the bronze(-worker); 9. 1 barig of barley — (paid) in full.
Our translation engine — Fable 5.1. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
_dam_ i3-li2-kar2-bi szah2-u2 _ARAD2_ sa-a-mi-isz dingir-a-zu _dam-gar3_ esz18-dar-al-su _sipa udu_ a-ma-ri2-isz _tug2_ ba-ni _zabar_ 1(barig) _sze_ ga-mi-ru-um
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OAIC 16. 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 (P215888) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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