Position in chronology
BIN 08, 115
About this tablet
An Early Dynastic land register from southern Mesopotamia, recording the surface areas of orchards — date-palm and fruit gardens — belonging to a town and to named individuals, including a potter and a man called A-zu-zu. The areas are given in the old Sumerian field measures (iku, bur, šar), from large plantations of some sixty-four bur down to small plots of a few iku. The closing line, 'it is of the year', marks it as an annual summary, the kind of survey a temple or palace estate kept so it knew exactly how much orchard land it controlled and who worked it.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Orchard survey for the year. Large orchards: 64 bur and 2 iku. Small orchards: 5 bur. Outlying field land belonging to the town of Ki-anna: 1 bur 3 iku. A further 5 bur of orchard is held by Ur-EN[...], the potter, and by An-na-E[...]. Another 4 iku of outlying orchard land belongs to A-zu-zu (the rest of that entry is broken). The reverse of the tablet is blank and worn.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 šar (= 60 bur) 4 bur 2 iku — orchard(s), large (ones); 5 bur — small orchard(s); 1 bur 3 iku — the outer (bar) portion of the field, of the city Ki-anna; 5 bur — orchard(s): the potter Ur-EN-[...], An-na-E[...]; 4 iku — the outer (bar) portion of an orchard, ... A-zu-zu [...]. It is (the account) of the year. (Reverse: uninscribed / surface eroded, no legible signs.)
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
1(szar2@c)#? 4(bur3@c)# 2(iku@c) kiri6# gu-la 5(bur3@c) kiri6 tur# 1(bur3@c)# 3(iku@c)# bar asza5-ga# iri ki an-na-ke4# 5(bur3@c) kiri6# bahar2# ur-en#-[x] an-na-e2#-[x] 4(iku@c) bar kiri6# x a-zu-zu [(x)] mu-a-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 115. 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 (P212663) — 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.