Position in chronology
VS 26, 193
About this tablet
A fragment of a private business letter from Kanesh (modern Kültepe in Turkey), the great Old Assyrian merchant colony of around 1900 BCE. The writer is pressing a colleague — addressed with the courteous formula 'you are my brother, pay heed!' — about textiles, the staple export that Assyrian traders carried by donkey caravan from Assur to Anatolia, and insists that the textiles be returned or sent back. Though badly broken, it is a typical voice from the world's oldest well-documented long-distance trade network.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads like an exasperated follow-up letter: 'I keep writing to you about this. One textile... receive it for me... and have the textiles returned.' The writer leans on his correspondent with the standard courtesies of the trade — 'you're my brother, so take this seriously' — and repeats his main demand a second time: the textiles must be sent back. A closing remark seems to stress that the goods in question are valuable. The edges of every line are broken away, so the details of quantities and names are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [I] have written to you (repeatedly), [thus] (say) I: "One textile [...] [...] to me, recei[ve ...] [...] let [them] retur[n] the textiles [...] [...] ... ever [...] [...] its/her [...], as much as [...] [...] you are my brother — pay heed! [...] [...] ... do not [...] [...] and let them return the textiles [...] [...] ... that [...] is preci[ous(?) ...]
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
[asz2]-ta#-pa2-ra-ku# [um-ma a]-na-ku-ma 1(disz) _tug2_ [...] [...] i-a-ti2 mu-hu#-[...] [...] _tug2# hi-a_ lu-ta-e-[...] [...] x ma-ti2-ma [...] [...]-al-sza ma-la2 qa2-[...] [...] a-hi a-ta i-hi-id# [...] [...] x-ra-am la2-ta-ha# [...] [...] u2 _tug2 hi-a_ lu-ta-e-ru# [...] [...] x x sza-ti2 wa-aq [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Assyrian (ca. 1950-1850 BC)) — VS 26, 193. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: VAT 06199 (Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany) — from Kanesh (mod. Kültepe) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P358320). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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