Position in chronology
AOAT 440, 199-200 BM 97938
About this tablet
A wage account from Old Babylonian Sippar, in northern Babylonia, roughly 1800 BCE. An estate or institutional scribe records barley paid out to twenty hired laborers doing fieldwork after plowing: breaking up and collecting the hard clods of earth, and piling up an irrigation dike. It is a snapshot of how ordinary agricultural labor was organized and paid in grain — the daily bookkeeping behind Mesopotamia's irrigated farming economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a payroll slip for farm work. Seventy-two liters of barley went to six men who broke up clods in the fields; eighty-four liters went to twelve men who gathered the clods; and twenty-four liters went to two men who piled up earth for the irrigation dike. Grand total paid out: 180 liters (three barig) of barley, booked as an expenditure. The arithmetic checks out — the individual payments add up exactly to the total.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 barig, 1 ban, 2 sila of barley: wages of 6 men, breakers [of clods]; 1 barig, 2 ban, 4 sila of barley: wages of 12 men, gatherer(s) of clods; 2 ban, 4 sila of barley: wages of 2 men who heaped up the dike. Total: 3 barig of barley, expended (zi-ga).
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
1(barig) 1(ban2) 2(disz) _sila3 sze_ i-di 6(disz) _lu2_ he-pi2-i 1(barig) 2(ban2) 4(disz) _sila3 sze_ i-di 1(u) 2(disz) _lu2_ la-qi2-it ki-ir-ba-nim 2(ban2) 4(disz) _sila3 sze_ i-di 2(disz) _lu2_ sza i-ki isz-pu-ku _szunigin 3(barig) sze_ _zi-ga_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Babylonian (ca. 1900-1600 BC)) — AOAT 440, 199-200 BM 97938. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: BM 097938 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Sippar-Yahrurum (mod. Tell Abu Habbah) ? — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P370929). source
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.