Position in chronology
BIN 08, 030
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic accounting tablet from southern Mesopotamia, now in the Yale Babylonian Collection, listing bundles of cloth and finished garments. The scribe tallies four kinds of textile — aktum-cloth, a second class written NI, an item called níg-bar-ba, and breast-bands or sashes — and then closes the record with a note that this is a "new tablet" carrying 38 items forward. It is the ordinary bookkeeping of a textile store, written in the compact archaic numeral system where a circle stands for ten and a wedge for one, and it shows that already in the mid-third millennium BCE Sumerian administrators were distinguishing garment types by name and rolling balances from one tablet to the next.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Textile inventory: 25 aktum garments; 17 of the NI type (twenty less three); 8 níg-bar-ba items; 3 sashes. This is a new tablet, with 38 items (forty less two) carried over.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine25 aktum-garments; 17 (20 minus 3) NI-textiles; 8 níg-bar-ba; 3 níg-lá gaba (breast-bands / sashes); New tablet: 38 (40 minus 2) remaining (egir).
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
2(u@c) 5(asz@c) aktum 2(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) NI tug2 8(asz@c) nig2-bar-ba 3(asz@c) nig2-la2 gaba dub gibil 4(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) egir
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 030. 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 (P212609) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.