Position in chronology
OIP 014, 171
About this tablet
A land-allotment record from Adab in central Iraq, written in the Old Akkadian period (around 2300 BCE), when the city was administered under the kings of Akkad. It lists the sizes of fields assigned to high officials — the chief scribe, the chief steward, the chief cupbearer, a merchant named Ur-mes and a surveyor — and then totals them at 79 bur, roughly 500 hectares of irrigated land. Texts like this show how the state rewarded its administrators with substantial estates, and how carefully the surveyors measured and totalled the land they handed out.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Here is the field register. The chief scribe gets 10 bur of land; the chief steward gets 10 bur; the chief cupbearer gets 10 bur; Ur-mes the merchant gets 6 bur; the surveyor gets a plot whose size is lost. Four further entries are too broken to read. One line mentions a man named Izzi who was designated for something. The total comes to 79 bur of field — plots of varying lengths, on irrigated ground, allotted to the workforce in narrow strips.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 1 bur'u (= 10 bur) of field: the chief scribe; 2.–3. 10 (bur): the chief steward (ensi-gal); 4. 10 (bur): the chief cupbearer; 5. 6 (bur): Ur-mes, the merchant; 6. [...] (bur): the surveyor (rope-measurer); 7. [...] 8. [...] 9. [...] 10. [...] 11. Izzi ... [...] designated (pa3-da); 12. Total: 1 šar (60 bur) + 2 bur'u (20 bur) minus 1 bur (= 79 bur) of field, 13. (plots) of assorted lengths, irrigated land, 14. field for the people/workers (UN), in narrow (strips).
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(bur'u@c) GAN2 dub-sar-mah 1(u) ensi2-gal 1(u) sagi-mah 6(asz) ur-mes dam-gar3 [...] lu2#-esz2-gid2 [...] [...] [...] [...] iz-zi a x [...] pa3#-da szunigin 1(szar2@c) 2(bur'u@c) la2 1(bur3@c) GAN2 us2 hi-a ki-duru5 GAN2# UN#-sze3 sal-la
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OIP 014, 171. 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 (P216027) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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