Position in chronology
OSP 2, 131
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged administrative note from Nippur in the Old Akkadian period (c. 2300 BCE), recording quantities of onions and garlic-type alliums measured by the talent. The entries name a man attached to an irrigation sluice, a craftsman, two individuals (Puzur-Suen and Ur-Damu) and a cupbearer, and some of the produce is marked as 'consumed'. It is a scrap of the everyday bookkeeping by which a temple or palace household at Nippur tracked a staple vegetable and who received it; the broken final line mentions the god Enlil, Nippur's patron.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives says roughly this: two measures of tu-lu onions went to the man in charge of the sluice gate; the craftsman got something now lost; these were eaten. After a gap, the tablet lists garlic-type onions and crushed onions by the talent, then one talent of garlic-type onions and one talent of tu-lu onions for Puzur-Suen and Ur-Damu, the cupbearer. The last line refers to Enlil—probably his temple—but the beginning of it is broken, as is most of the first half of the tablet.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [...] 2 tu-lu₂-onions, the man of the kab₂-ku₅ (water-regulator) 2. the dub-nagar (craftsman) ... [...] 3. [con]sumed. 4. [...] 5. [... sikil]-onions, (by the) talent 6. [...] ... [...] 7. [...] crushed onions, (by the) talent 8. 1 talent of sikil-onions, 9. 1 talent of tu-lu₂-onions: 10. Puzur-Suen, 11. Ur-Damu, 12. the cupbearer. 13. [... En]lil.
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
[...] 2(disz) szum2 tu lu2 kab2-ku5 dub-nagar x [...] [ib2]-gu7 [...] [... szum2]-sikil# gu2 [...] x [...] [...] szum2 gaz gu2 1(asz@c) szum2-sikil gu2 1(asz@c) szum2 tu lu2 gu2 puzur4-suen ur-da-mu sagi [... en]-lil2-la2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 2, 131. 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 (P216285) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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