Position in chronology
OIP 014, 089
About this tablet
A small accounting tablet from Adab in southern Iraq, written in the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, about 2300 BCE. It records a week's worth of beer — 12 sila a day for seven days — together with four loaves of bread set aside as a first-fruit offering, and converts both into the amount of barley they cost. The food and drink went to the Emaḫ, the great temple of Adab, as an offering 'eaten' by the god Enlil, during the month of the Akitu festival. It shows how temple cult was run as a matter of careful bookkeeping.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Beer at 12 sila a day for seven days; that works out to 2 barig and 6 sila of barley, charged as the regular daily provision. Then four loaves of bread for the first-fruit offering, with a damaged entry mentioning someone or something described as 'tall'; a line here is lost. The barley for that comes to 5 ban. All of it went to the Emaḫ temple as food consumed by the god Enlil. Dated to the month of the Akitu festival.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 12 sila of beer each (per day), 2. for 7 days; 3. its barley: 2 barig 6 sila — regular provision (sa₂-du₁₁). 4. 4 loaves of bread, first-fruit offering (ne-sag) [...] UMBIN×LU, tall (sukud); 5. [...] 6. its barley: 5 ban. 7. (For) the Emaḫ, 8. consumed by (offering of) Enlil. 9. Month: Akiti.
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
1(u) 2(disz) sila3 kasz-ta u4 7(disz@t)-sze3 sze-bi 2(barig@c) 6(disz) sila3 sa2-du11 4(asz@c) ninda ne-sag [...] |UMBINxLU|# sukud [...] sze-bi 5(ban2) e2-mah gu7-a en-lil2 iti a2-ki-ti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OIP 014, 089. 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: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA (P215946) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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