Position in chronology
OSP 2, 122
About this tablet
A badly damaged administrative fragment from Nippur in southern Iraq, dating to the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period, roughly 2300–2200 BCE. Only the ends of a few lines survive: a personal name Ur-saga, a reference to the city and to someone's spoken order, an entry for an overseer named Dudu, and a count of six connected with the governor. It is a scrap of the everyday bookkeeping of a city administration — the kind of record that tracked people, goods, and officials under the rule of the Akkadian kings.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Too little survives of this tablet to reconstruct the transaction. What can be read runs: something was given or measured out; a man named Ur-saga is involved; there is a reference to the city and to someone's instruction or declaration. Then two entries: one item or person under Dudu the overseer, and six under the governor. The beginning, the end, and the left side of every line are broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Beginning destroyed) 1. [...] given(?); (its) measure(?) [...] 2. [Ur]-saga 3. [...] (of) the city 4. [...] ...-iš 5. [...] his statement/order 6. 1 Dudu, the overseer 7. 6 (units/persons): the governor (ensi) 8. [...] ... [...] (rest destroyed)
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
[...] szum2 kab2-<ku5> [ur]-sa6#-ga [...] iri [...] x-isz [...] du11-ga-ni 1(asz@c) du-du nu-banda3# 6(disz) ensi2 [...] x [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 2, 122. 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 (P216276) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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