Position in chronology
SAA 07 179. Food and Drink Offerings(?)
About this tablet
A badly damaged administrative fragment from the Neo-Assyrian imperial records, tentatively classed among the accounts of food and drink offerings from the royal centres of Assyria (seventh century BCE). What survives is a tally: hides of female animals, sheep, a wild ox, garments, and a military officer — a cohort commander — apparently involved in receiving or supplying the goods. Even in ruins, it shows the bureaucratic machinery that moved animals, leather, and textiles through the Assyrian palace economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a scrap of an inventory. The opening lines are too broken to read, but the list goes on to count animal products and goods: one hide from a female animal, then another; some sheep; one wild ox; and two garments of an unspecified type. One entry notes that something is 'at the disposal of' someone whose name is lost, and a cohort commander — an army officer — appears among the recipients or suppliers. There is also a clause about items that a group of people apparently returned or brought back. Everything before, between, and after these entries is lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(beginning broken) [......] hide of a female animal, [......]..., [......]...-pi, [......]...-ṣute, [......] ... ... ..., [...... which] they [re]turned(?), [......]s ... (KUR-ru), [......] sheep(?); 1 hide of a female animal, 1 hide of a female animal(?) [...], 1 wild ox [...], at the disposal of [...], 1 cohort com[mander ...], 2 ...-garments [...] (rest broken)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[x x x x KUŠ].⸢SAL⸣ / [x x x x x x]+⸢x⸣ / [x x x x x x]-pi / [x x x x x]-ṣu-te / [x x x x] ⸢ka?⸣ ḫi ⸢bu?⸣ / [x x x x]-⸢gúr?⸣-u-ni-ni / [x x x x]-MEŠ KUR-ru / [x x x x] ⸢UDU?⸣-MEŠ 01 KUŠ.SAL / 01 KUŠ.⸢SAL?⸣ [x x x] / 01 AM [x x x] / ina IGI ⸢KUR?⸣ [x x x] / 01 GAL—⸢ki⸣-[ṣir? x x x] / 02 TÚG.me?-[x x x]
Scholarly note
Neo-Assyrian administrative record (palace or temple), edited by F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate (SAA 7, 1992). ORACC text P336647.
Attribution
Image: Adapted from F. Mario Fales and J. Nicholas Postgate, Imperial Administrative Records, Part I: Palace and Temple Administration (State Archives of Assyria, 7), 1992. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2017, as part of the research programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich (Karen Radner, Humboldt Professorship 2015. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/P336647/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.