Position in chronology
OSP 2, 172
About this tablet
A small administrative receipt from Nippur in southern Iraq, dating to the Old Akkadian period (around 2300 BCE). It records quantities of garlic — counted in strings of sixty and then measured out by volume — issued from a household storehouse and received by an agent of the house's overseer. Texts like this show how even humble produce was tracked, counted and double-checked by the scribes of a temple or estate economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The first entries are damaged: someone named Ur-[...] received a quantity (twenty-odd of something), and further lots of 180 and 300 units follow, their nature lost. Then the readable part: sixty strings of garlic were taken from the household stores, and two gur of garlic, verified against the official measure, were handed over to the agent of the household overseer, who signed for the receipt. The beginning and several middle lines are too broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [...] 20 [...] 2. Ur-[...] 3. received. 4. 180 [...] ... ... ... 5. 300 [...] 6. [...] 7. 60 strings of [...] garlic, 8. from the house(hold): 9. 2 (gur) of garlic, checked (against the standard measure), 10. the man of the overseer of the house 11. received.
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(u) [...] ur-[...] szu ba-ti 3(gesz2) [...] x x x 5(gesz2) [...] [...] 1(gesz2) szum2-[...] sa e2-ta 2(asz@c) szum2 kab2-ku5 lu2 ugula-e2 szu ba-ti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 2, 172. 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 (P216326) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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Related sources
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