Position in chronology
OSP 2, 103
About this tablet
A fragment of a grain account from Nippur in the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, around 2300 BCE. It lists very large quantities of grain — several hundred gur, each gur roughly 300 litres — against the names of individuals, opening with a heading about a 'tithe' and closing with a year-name that dated the document by an act of the king. Even broken, it shows the scale at which the Sargonic administration at Nippur moved and tracked agricultural produce, probably from fields under its control.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a ledger of grain. It opens with a line about 'its tithe', then records who was responsible for or received each lot: Ur-Abzu, then some 660 gur and a few ban for Girini, about 605 gur for Aneda, a batch of roughly 180 gur, then 110 gur less an amount now lost, for A-GIR-gal, and a final 60 gur or so marked as allotted. A field connected with silver or with a man named Ku-... is mentioned, and the text ends with a date formula: 'the year the king ...'. The right-hand side of nearly every line is broken away, so the commodity and most of the totals' tails are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. Its tithe (zag-10) [...] 2. Ur-Abzu [...] 3. 660 (gur) 3 ban [...] 4. Giri-[ni] 5. 605 (gur) [...] 6. Ane-[da] 7. 180 (gur) 1 ban ... [...] 8. 110 (gur) 3 ban minus [...] 9. A-GIR2-gunû-gal 10. 60 (gur) 3 ban, allotted (ba-)... [...] 11. Field: Ku-[...] 12. Year: the king 13. ... [...]
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
za3 1(u)-bi3 [...] ur-abzu [...] 1(gesz'u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 3(ban2@c) [...] giri3-[ni] 1(gesz'u@c) 5(asz@c) [...] a-ne#-[da] 3(gesz2@c) 1(ban2@c) x [...] 2(gesz2@c) la2 1(u@c) 3(ban2@c) la2# [...] a-GIR2@g-gal 1(gesz2@c) 3(ban2@c) ba-x [...] GAN2 ku3-[...] mu lugal-[e] nam#-[...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 2, 103. 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 (P216257) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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