Position in chronology
BIN 08, 010
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic account tablet from southern Mesopotamia, now in the Yale Babylonian Collection, listing precious metal and wool handed over to one named person. The scribe tallies shekels and talents of silver — including a grade called "washed" or refined silver — plus a mina of goat wool and a fraction of a fibre commodity, then closes with the recipient's name and the standard verb of transfer. Several of the commodity words are written with archaic, ambiguous sign-groups that resist confident translation, which is typical of this very early stage of Sumerian bookkeeping. It is the kind of one-off receipt that a household or temple steward would write to record that goods had left the storeroom.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Goods released: five shekels of refined silver; one talent of white silver; and three further talents of metal listed under names we can no longer read with confidence, one of them specified as pure. Then one unit of silver, one item written UD-eme, one mina of goat wool, and a third of a measure of flax. All of it was collected by a woman whose name appears to be Geme-ur-ganun. Essentially a short outgoing-goods receipt: what left the store, and who took it.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 shekels of refined silver; 1 talent of white silver(?); 1 talent of kur-PA; 1 talent of ... DIB(?) kur ...; 1 talent of PA TAR-TAR(?), of pure metal; 1 SIG₇(?) of silver; 1 UD-eme; 1 mina of goat wool, AG; 1/3 of nu-gu (flax?). Geme-ur-ganun(?) has taken (them) away.
Our translation engine — Opus 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
5(asz@c) ku3-luh gin2 1(asz@c) ku3-babbar? gu2 1(asz@c) kur PA gu2 1(asz@c) x DIB? kur x gu2 1(asz@c) PA TAR-TAR? ku3#-ga gu2 1(asz@c) SIG7? ku3 1(asz@c) UD eme 1(asz@c) ma-na siki ud5 AG 1/3(asz@c) nu-gu geme2?-ur-ganun? ba-de6
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 010. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Nies Babylonian Collection, Yale Babylonian Collection, New Haven, Connecticut, USA (P221538) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.