Position in chronology

OSP 2, 110

~2270 BCE·Akkadian Empire·P216264

About this tablet

A small ration list from Nippur in the Old Akkadian period (c. 2300 BCE), the kind of everyday accounting slip a temple or estate office produced by the hundreds. Eight people — among them a man with a Sumerian name, a man with an Akkadian name (Ilī-dān, 'my god is strong'), someone identified only as 'the man of Pūsa', and the chief leatherworker — each receive a measured amount of barley, from about one barig (roughly 60 liters) down to a single ban (about 10 liters). The mix of Sumerian and Akkadian names in one list is a snapshot of Nippur's bilingual society under the kings of Akkad.

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

Written in modern English

Here is who gets grain this time: Uku-mul and Aneda share one barig; Girini also gets one barig. A-GIR₂-gal gets two ban, and so does Lugal-gubbani. Ilī-dān, who works for Pūsa, gets one ban. The chief leatherworker gets two ban. That is the whole list — no total, no date, no signature, just the names and the amounts handed out.

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

Translation — our engine

Our engine
Medium confidence
1. 1 barig — Uku-mul, 2. (and) Aneda; 3. 1 barig — Girini; 4. 2 ban — A-GIR₂-gal; 5. 2 ban — Lugal-gubbani; 6. 1 ban — Ilī-dān, 7. the man of Pūsa; 8. 2 ban — the chief leatherworker.
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(barig@c) u2-ku-mul
a-ne-da
1(barig@c) giri3-ni
2(ban2@c) a-GIR2@g-gal
2(ban2@c) lugal-gub-ba-ni
1(ban2@c) i3-li2-dan
lu2 pu3-sa
2(ban2@c) aszgab-gal

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 2, 110. 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 (P216264) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).

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