Position in chronology
PBS 09, 035
About this tablet
A small, badly broken administrative fragment from Nippur in the Sargonic (Old Akkadian) period, roughly 2300–2200 BCE. What survives is a list: personal names, a couple of entries counting 'Subarians' — people from the northern region of Subartu, who appear in southern Mesopotamian accounts as dependent or servile labour — and a grain measure attached to another name. Too little remains to say what transaction it recorded, but it shows the everyday bookkeeping by which the Akkadian-period administration at Nippur tracked people and rations.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What can still be read is a short account. It opens with a name, Geme-ḪAR, followed by two entries ticked off with a check mark: Bubu and A-Enlil. Then come two lines counting people from Subartu — five in the first entry and one in the second, with whatever followed each now lost. Next, one barig of some commodity (about 60 litres) is booked against a person whose name begins En-lil... The final surviving word is 'tablet', probably the start of a closing note about the document itself. The rest of the tablet is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. Geme-ḪAR [...] 2. PAP: Bubu [...] 3. PAP: A-Enlil [...] 4. 5 Subarian(s) [...] 5. 1 Subarian [...] 6. 1 barig (of ...): En[lil-...] 7. Tablet (of) [...] (rest lost)
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
geme2-HAR# [...] PAP bu3-bu3# [...] PAP a2-en-lil2# [...] 5(asz@c) su-birx(|SZIMxNIG2|)#-a [...] 1(asz@c) su-birx(|SZIMxNIG2|)#-[a ...] 1(barig@c) en-[lil2-...] dub# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — PBS 09, 035. 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 (P216346) — 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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