Position in chronology
OSP 1, 060
About this tablet
A small, broken administrative fragment from Nippur in southern Iraq, written in the Old Akkadian period (roughly 2300–2200 BCE), when the city was under the rule of the kings of Akkad. It is a tally of people: each entry gives a count of one or two followed by a personal name or a man identified as the dependent of someone, or as coming from another city — Šuruppak and Adab, both Sumerian towns not far from Nippur. Such lists were kept by temple or palace clerks to track workers, ration recipients or conscripts, and this one shows how men from several cities were being counted together at Nippur.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a headcount. The top of the list is damaged: there is someone whose name was probably Puzur-Eštar, another man whose name ends in '-išti', and a man belonging to Ariri, but how many of each there were is lost. Then the readable part: one Ilum-qar; one man of Alu; one man from Šuruppak; and two men from Adab. Nothing else of the tablet remains in the transliteration.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [......] Puzur-[Eš]tar(?) 2. [......]-išti 3. [......] man of Ariri 4. 1 Ilum-qar 5. 1 man of Alu 6. 1 man of Šuruppak 7. 2 men of Adab
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
[...] puzur4#-[esz18]-dar#? [...]-isz-ti [...] lu2# a-ri-ri 1(asz@c) i3-lum-qar 1(asz@c) lu2 a-lu2 1(asz@c) lu2 szuruppak 2(asz@c) lu2 adab#[]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 1, 060. 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 (P216117) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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