Position in chronology
AAICAB 1/1, pl. 008, 1928-439
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged account tablet from Kish in central Iraq, written in the Early Dynastic period (roughly the mid-third millennium BCE). It sets out a series of field parcels, measured in surface units, alongside sums of silver reckoned in shekels and fractions of a shekel — the kind of record kept when land was bought, leased, or assessed against a payment. Because every line has lost its opening numeral, we can no longer say how large the fields were or who the parties were, but the pairing of land with silver is one of the oldest forms of property accounting known.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The first half of the tablet is a column of land parcels, each entry ending with the word for 'field' — six of them, though the acreage figures at the start of every line have broken off. The second half switches to money: a third of a shekel of silver, then ten shekels, then one shekel, then half a shekel, then one more entry whose commodity is lost. What survives is a ledger matching plots of land against payments in silver; the names of the people involved and the totals are gone with the broken edges, and the back of the tablet carries no legible writing.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse (column i, ruled cases; beginnings of lines lost) [... ] iku(?) of field [... ] iku(?) of field [... ] iku(?) of field [... ] iku(?) of field [... ] iku(?) of field [... ] iku(?) of field 1/3 (shekel) of silver [ ... ] 10 shekels(?) of silver [ ... ] 1(?) shekel of silver [ ... ] 1/2 shekel of silver [ ... ] 1 [ ... ] (The remainder of the tablet is broken away; the reverse is uninscribed or wholly effaced.)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] GAN2# [...] GAN2 [...] GAN2 [...] GAN2 [...] GAN2 [...] GAN2 1/3(disz@c) ku3# [...] 1(u@c) ku3# gin2#? [...] 1(asz@c)? ku3 gin2# [...] 1/2(disz@c) ku3# gin2# [...] 1(asz@c) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — AAICAB 1/1, pl. 008, 1928-439. 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: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P212416) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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