OSP 1, 054

About this tablet

A small administrative roster from Nippur in the Old Akkadian period (around 2300 BCE), part of the University of Pennsylvania's excavated collection. A scribe lists a dozen or so named individuals — among them a potter, a builder, and a man with the Akkadian name Puzur-Eštar — each with a tally mark of one (once two), and dates the record to the 19th day of the Nippur month named for brick-making. It is probably a daily headcount of workers or recipients of a single ration or beer allotment; such terse lists are the surviving bookkeeping of a temple or municipal workforce.

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

Written in modern English

A list of people, each with a count beside the name. One for beer (or a man named Kaš), the potter; one for Ur-Utu; a damaged entry ending in -ni; another, broken, for a builder; one for Adda; one for MI-lu-lu; two for Puzur-Eštar; one for Lu-lugal; one for Lu-u, whose title is only partly legible; then two more entries for men whose names are lost. The record is dated to the 19th day of the month 'Brick placed in the mould'. Several lines are too damaged to read.

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

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Medium confidence

1. 1 — beer (or: Kaš), 2. the potter; 3. 1 — Ur-Utu; 4. [...]-ni; 5. [...] the builder; 6. 1 — Adda; 7. 1 — MI?-lu-lu; 8. 2 — Puzur-Eštar; 9. 1 — Lu-lugal; 10. 1 — Lu-[u], the ereš(?)-[...]; 11. [...] man [...]; 12. 1 — the man [...]. 13. Month: "Brick placed in the mould" (sig₄-u₅-šub-ba-gar); 14. day 20 less 1 (= the 19th day).

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

1(asz@c) kasz
bahar2
1(asz@c) ur-utu
[... asz]-ni
[...] szitim#
1(asz@c) ad-da
1(asz@c) MI#?-lu2-lu2
2(asz@c) puzur4-esz18-dar
1(asz@c) lu2-lugal#
1(asz@c) lu2-[u5] erisz2#[]
[...] lu2 [...]
1(asz@c) lu2 [...]
iti sig4-u5-szub-ba-gar
u4 2(u@c) la2 1(asz@c)

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 1, 054. 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: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P216111) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).

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