Position in chronology
BIN 08, 016
About this tablet
A small clay account from Girsu (modern Tello) in southern Iraq, written roughly 2400 BCE, near the end of the Early Dynastic period. A temple or palace scribe has ruled the tablet into boxes and listed measures of barley — 5, 2, 15, 2, 2 gur — each set against the name of the person who received or delivered it, using the big 'gur-saggal' standard of about 144 liters. Several names and the final lines are chipped or worn away. It is the most ordinary kind of document in Mesopotamia, and precisely for that reason one of the most informative: a snapshot of how a Sumerian institution moved its grain and who was on its books.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A grain ledger: 5 gur of barley, measured by the large standard, for Ur-en-sig-nuna; 2 gur, ma-mud; barley for [...]-sag; 5 gur of barley for Me-mea; 15 gur for E-geština-su; 2 gur for Nin-mu-gin-amah; 2 gur plus 2 gur for Ili-li. The remaining entries — a name ending in -HAR, another that is illegible, then nu-SAHAR-a and Ma-ma-kiši-gal — survive only in part, and the amounts beside them are lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 gur (by the large gur-standard) of barley — Ur-en-sig-nuna(?); 2 (gur), ma-mud; [...]-sag, barley; 5 (gur) of barley, Me-mea; 15 gur, E-geština-su; 2 (gur), Nin-mu-gin-amah; 2 (gur), 2 (gur), Ili-li; [...]-HAR; [...]-...; nu-SAHAR-a; Ma-ma-kiši-gal.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
5(asz@c) sze gur saggal ur#-en-sig#?-nun-na# 2(asz@c)#? ma#-mud [x]-sag sze 5(asz@c) sze me-me-a 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) gur e2-gesztin-su13 2(asz@c) nin-mu-gin7#-a-mah 2(asz@c) 2(asz@c) i3-li2-li2 [...]-HAR [...]-x-x nu-SAHAR-a# ma#?-ma-kiszi17-gal#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 016. 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 (P221543) — 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.