Position in chronology
TCBI 1, 027
About this tablet
This is a fragment of a Sargonic-period (Akkadian era) labor roster from Adab, one of many administrative tablets recording work gangs of women and men attached to an institutional household — likely a temple or palace estate. The scribe tallies female grinders, an 'extra man,' large blocks of female laborers, and male workers, closing with a note that a further group of women were sick and therefore excluded from the official count. Such texts are the bookkeeping backbone of the Sargonic state economy, tracking who worked, in what role, and who did not count toward labor quotas.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving part of this tablet is a worker tally. It records small numbers of women assigned to grinding grain, one extra male worker, then a large group of 274 women, another batch of 30 women grinders, and 20 men. After a break, the text lists 67 more women who were sick — and a note specifies that these sick workers were not included in the official count. The beginning of the tablet is lost, so we don't know the full context or total sums that likely once framed this list.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [n+]1 female workers (geme₂), grinders (ar₃) extra man (lu₂-diri) 274 female workers (geme₂) [n+]30 female workers (geme₂), grinders (ar₃) 20 male workers (gurusz) [...] 67 female workers (geme₂), sick (tu-ra), not counted (nu-szid).
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] [n] 1(asz@c) geme2# ar3 lu2-diri 4(gesz2@c)# 3(u@c) 4(asz@c) geme2 [n] 3(u@c) geme2 ar3 2(u@c) gurusz [...] 1(gesz2@c) 7(asz@c) geme2# tu-ra nu-szid
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — TCBI 1, 027. 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: BdI 1, 023 (Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy) — from Adab (mod. Bismaya) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P382279). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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