OIP 014, 160

About this tablet

A small, damaged administrative tablet from the Sumerian city of Adab (modern Bismaya in southern Iraq), written in the Old Akkadian period (about 2300 BCE). It lists a few valuable objects — a garment appraised at ten shekels of silver, items called 'dur' (one of them bronze) — and ends by labelling the lot a 'gift' connected with two named individuals and the city of Adab. It is a fragment of the record-keeping that tracked presents and valuables moving between people and institutions in an early Mesopotamian city.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

The surviving entries read: a textile of the šita-ulla(?) type; one našparum garment, valued at ten shekels of silver; one 'dur' item of the bala type; one bronze 'dur'. The next two lines are too broken to read. Then a quantity of forty of something now lost. The tablet closes by calling these things a gift associated with a person whose name begins Zarpu-, together with a man named Mezi, and with the city of Adab.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

Obverse (?) 1. [...] šita(?)-ulla 2. 1 našparum-garment — 3. its silver (value): 10 shekels; 4. 1 dur₂ (of) bala; 5. 1 bronze dur₂; 6. [...] ...(?) [...] 7. [...] ... [...] 8. 40 ... 9. gift (of) Zarpu-[...]; 10. Mezi; 11. Adab.

Indicative reading — translated without a photograph. Generated from the transliteration alone, without examining the original. Read it as an accessible first taste, not as a verified catalogue entry.

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

[...] szita?-ul3#-la
1(asz@c) tug2!(KU) na-asz2#-[pa2]-ru-um#
ku3-bi 1(u) gin2
1(asz@c)# dur2 bala
1(asz@c)# dur2 zabar#
[...] ni#? [...]
[...] su [...]
4(u@c) x
nig2-ba za-ar-pu#-[...]
me-zi#
adab#[]

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OIP 014, 160. 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 (P216016) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).

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