Position in chronology
OSP 2, 010
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative tablet from Nippur in the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, roughly 2300 BCE. It lists people — a man attached to an envoy, an overseer, someone connected with the city gate — and the standard rations issued to them: barley, dried fish and salt, each at a fixed amount per person. Such lists are the paperwork behind how an institution fed its workforce, and the dried fish and salt entries show that rations were not barley alone.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads like a ration roster. It opens with Ititi, who belongs to the envoy's staff, then an overseer whose name is lost, then someone linked to the city gate. The rations follow at a per-person rate: a certain amount of barley, 5 sila (about 5 litres) of dried fish, and half a sila of salt each. A total of 64 of something comes next, then more names or titles — one line ends in 'mu-sar', another in '-lim', one entry counts 60 of an item, and a bailiff is mentioned near the end. The rest of the tablet is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. Ititi, (the man) of the sukkal (envoy); 2. [...], the overseer (nu-banda); 3. [...] (of) the city gate; 4. [n (measures of) barley ... each]; 5. 5 [sila of dried fish each]; 6. 1/2 [sila of salt each]; 7. 64 [...]; 8. [...] mu-sar; 9. [...]...-lim; 10. 60 [...] gim; 11. [...]-galla (the bailiff); 12. [...] (rest broken)
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
i-ti-ti szu sukkal-le [...] nu-banda3 [...] ka-gal [n sze x-ta] 5(disz)# [sila3 ku6 had2-ta] 1/2(disz) [sila3 mun-ta] 1(gesz2) 4(disz)# [...] [...] mu#-sar# [...] x-li-im 1(gesz2) [...] gim [... szu]-gal5:la2 [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 2, 010. 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 (P216162) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.