Position in chronology
OAIC 50
About this tablet
A short list of eleven personal names from the city of Ešnunna (modern Tell Asmar in the Diyala region of Iraq), written in the Old Akkadian period, roughly 2300–2150 BCE. Most of the names are Akkadian and several carry the feminine ending -tum, so the list is probably a roster of personnel — perhaps women and dependants attached to a household or institution — with one man, Bilā, identified by his trade as a bird-catcher. There is no total, commodity, or transaction: the tablet is the kind of bare name-list an administrator kept to track who belonged to a group or who was owed rations.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is simply a roll call. It names eleven people one after another: Dumaga, Ummī-Eštar, Eštar-ge, Dārētum, Bilā the fowler, Lāwiptum, Wazuzu, Zuzu, Gur-bibi, Ilī-abī and Tadlultum. Nothing else is recorded — no amounts, no date, no reason for the list — so we can only say that someone in Ešnunna needed to keep track of this particular group of people, several of them women, and one of them a man who made his living catching birds.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. Dumaga 2. Ummī-Eštar 3. Eštar-ge₆ (Eštar-mī?) 4. Dārētum 5. Bilā, the fowler (mušen-[dù]) 6. Lāwiptum 7. Wazuzu 8. Zuzu 9. Gur-bibi 10. Ilī-abī 11. Tadlultum
Our translation engine — Fable 5.1. 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.
Transliteration
du-ma-ga um-mi-esz18-dar esz18-dar-ge6 dar-e-tum bi2-la2 _muszen-[du3_] la2-wi-ip-tum wa-zu-zu zu-zu gur bi2-bi2 i3-li2-a-bi2 ta2-ad-lul-tum
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OAIC 50. 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 (P215922) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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