Position in chronology
BIN 08, 083
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic administrative tablet — a short ledger of fodder or grass bundles assigned to (or delivered by) named men and two supervisory officials. Each line pairs a number with a person: En-akale, Kar-du, Ur-ni, En-tar-si, and then two entries identified only by rank, the foreman attached to an overseer and a foreman on his own. The half-unit in the last entry (32½) shows the accounting was kept to fractional precision. It is the kind of routine institutional bookkeeping — feeding animals or crediting labour quotas — that fills the earliest Mesopotamian archives.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Fodder accounting, by bundle: En-akale, 54; Kar-du, 35; Ur-ni, 40; En-tar-si, 42; the overseer's foreman, 36; the foreman, 32½. Nothing further was written on the back of the tablet.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine54 bundles of grass (fodder): En-akale; 35: Kar-du; 40: Ur-ni; 42: En-tar-si; 36: the foreman of the overseer (nu-banda); 32 1/2: the foreman. (Reverse uninscribed.)
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(u) 4(disz@t) u2 sa en-a2-kal-le 3(u) 5(disz@t) kar du3 4(u) ur2-ni 4(u) 2(disz@t) en-tar-si 3(u)# 6(disz@t) ugula nu-banda3 3(u) 2(disz@t) 1/2(disz) ugula
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 083. 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 (P221566) — 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.