Position in chronology
Akkadica 134/1 §2.9b
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative account from Larsa in southern Babylonia, written in the Old Babylonian period (early second millennium BCE). What survives are quantities of grain measured in gur (a standard capacity measure, roughly 300 liters in this period) set against personal names — men with names like Erra-[...], someone whose name ends in the moon-god Suen, and a certain Zakuri. It is a scrap of everyday bookkeeping: grain moving into or out of an institution or private household, with each amount tied to the person responsible.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged ledger page. The first entries record counts — 14 of something, then 254 of something else — but what was being counted is lost. Then comes a list of people: two men whose names honor the moon-god Suen, a man named Erra-something, and one Yada'atum. After a break in the tablet, the accounting resumes with grain: six gur of grain in one entry, one gur linked to a man called Zakuri, and another six gur linked to the same Zakuri. The rest is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 14 [...] 254 (4 sixties + 14?) [...] [...]-Suen(?) [...]-Suen(?) Erra-[...] [...] Yada'atum(?) [...] (Break) [...] 6 gur [...] 1 gur [...] Zakuri(?) [...] 6 gur [...] Zakuri(?)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. 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
1(u) 4(disz) [...] 4(gesz2) 1(u) 4(disz)#? [...] [...] suen#? [...] suen#? er3#-ra#-[...] [...] ia-da#-[a]-a#?-[tum?] [...] [...] [...] 6(disz) _gur_ [...] 1(disz) gur [...] za#-ku#?-ri# [...] 6(disz) gur [...] za#-ku#?-ri#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Babylonian (ca. 1900-1600 BC)) — Akkadica 134/1 §2.9b. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: PML 46.069 (Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri, USA) — from Larsa (mod. Tell as-Senkereh) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P459089). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
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.