Position in chronology
OSP 2, 176
About this tablet
A small, badly broken administrative fragment from Nippur in the Old Akkadian period (about 2300 BCE). It records amounts of crushed onion or garlic — a staple of the Mesopotamian diet — passing through the hands of a household overseer, a group of workmen, and a courier named Namu-dab. Even in its damaged state it shows how carefully temple and estate bureaucracies tracked humble foodstuffs, noting when a quantity had been formally measured and verified.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a list of onion deliveries. Someone's crushed onions are entered at the top, next to a name beginning with Enlil-. A line or two later the estate overseer appears, then an entry involving oil, then the workmen's gang. Then comes a clear item: one unit of crushed onions, measured and checked, credited to the courier Namu-dab. The last readable line mentions crushed onions once more. The edges of every line are broken away, so the quantities and most of the names are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [...] crushed onion(s) [...] 2. [...] Enlil-[...] 3. ...-da-... 4. the overseer of the household [...] 5. oil [...] / i₃-[...] 6. man (of the) workmen [...] 7. 1 (unit of) crushed onion(s), checked by measure; 8. Namu-dab, the courier(?); 9. [...] crushed onion(s)
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 gaz# [...] [...] en-lil2#-[...] x-da-x ugula-e2 [...] i3-[...] lu2 gurusz [...] 1(asz@c) szum2 gaz kab2#-[ku5] na-mu-dab ra-gaba#? [...] szum2# gaz
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 2, 176. 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 (P216330) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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