Position in chronology
BIN 08, 040
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic livestock account from Isin in southern Mesopotamia, written in Sumerian on a thick, hand-sized clay tablet. It counts a single modest herd of cattle by age and sex — seven full-grown cows, two three-year-old heifers, a two-year-old ox and two unweaned calves — adds them up to twelve head, and then names four men, presumably the herdsmen responsible or the parties to the transfer. Documents like this are the raw bookkeeping of temple and palace estates around 2500 BCE, and they show how precisely ancient scribes tracked animals by age class long before there were coins or contracts.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Herd inventory: seven mature cows, two heifers aged three, one two-year-old ox, one heifer calf still nursing, and one bull calf still nursing — twelve animals in total. Responsible parties: Ur-li-kam, U'uma, An-si, and Ma-za-uma. The tablet gives no further detail; the reverse is otherwise blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine7 cows, mother(-animals); 2 cows, 3 years old; 1 ox, 2 years old; 1 calf, female, (still) suckling; 1 calf, male, (still) suckling. Its total: 12 (head). Ur-li-kam; U'uma; An-si; Ma-za-uma.
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
7(asz@c) ab2 ama 2(asz@c) ab2 mu 3(disz@t) 1(asz@c) gu4# mu 2(disz@t) 1(asz@c) amar munus ga 1(asz@c) amar gu4 ga szu-nigin2-bi3 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) ur-li-kam u3-um-a an-si ma-za-um-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 040. 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 (P212617) — 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.