Position in chronology
OAIC 47
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged Old Akkadian tablet from Eshnunna (modern Tell Asmar in eastern Iraq), written around 2300–2200 BCE and now kept at the Field Museum in Chicago. The surviving words mix commodities — sesame oil, emmer flour, barley, sesame — with the opening formula of a letter ('Thus says ...') and the names of people and groups: a man called Zuzu, soldiers, and elders. It is too broken to reconstruct the transaction, but it shows the everyday traffic of foodstuffs and instructions passing between officials in a provincial town of the Akkadian empire.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives begins with a short list: sesame oil and emmer flour, followed by two lines too broken to read. Then comes the opening of a message — 'Thus says [someone]' — addressed to a man named Zuzu. It concerns barley for the soldiers and something sent to the elders, and mentions a person or place called Gudusiš. The last lines return to goods: sesame (apparently 'of Kitim') and more sesame. Who was writing, and exactly what was being ordered or delivered, is lost with the broken portions of the tablet.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) 1. sesame oil, 2. emmer flour, 3. [......] 4. [......] 5. AN-[......] 6. Thus (says) [......]: 7. to Zuzu, 8. for barley 9. (of) the soldier(s), 10. to the elder(s), 11. Gudusiš, 12. sesame of Kitim (?), 13. sesame.
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
_i3 gesz#_ _zi3 imgaga3_ [...] [...] AN#-[...] en-ma a-na zu-zu a-na _sze_ _aga3-us2_ a-na _abba2_ gu-du-si-isz _gesz i3_ ki-ti-im# _gesz i3_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OAIC 47. 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: Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA (P215919) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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