Position in chronology
BIN 08, 092
About this tablet
A small Old Akkadian ledger from Mesopotamia, now in the Yale Babylonian Collection, tallying days of service or labour credited to a handful of named men — Lugal-lu-KA with three days, Ur-pu, U-u, Šeš-kina and Lugal-nesag with one each. The name Adda stands alone at the top, most likely the supervisor or the household under whose responsibility the account was kept. Two further names, Dam-maḫ and Šeš-kura, appear without surviving numerals, and the last two lines are damaged. It is the plainest kind of bureaucratic paperwork, the sort of day-count a foreman kept to know who had worked and for how long.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Under Adda's name, the scribe lists work-days: Lugal-lu-KA, three days; Ur-pu, one day; U-u, one day. Dam-maḫ is entered next, though the figure beside him no longer survives. Šeš-kina is credited with one day (the numeral is damaged), Šeš-kura follows without a readable count, and Lugal-nesag has one day. The final two lines are broken — one begins with what looks like "the man of ..." and the last preserves only the name Gal-zu. In modern terms, a foreman's timesheet: names in one column, days worked in the other.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. Adda. 2. 3 days: Lugal-lu-KA. 3. 1 day: Ur-pu. 4. 1 day: U-u. 5. Dam-maḫ(!). 6. 1[?] day: Šeš-kina. 7. Šeš-kura[.......] 8. 1 day: Lugal-nesag. 9. The man[?] of ...... 10. ...... Gal-zu.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
ad-da 3(disz@t) u4 lugal-lu2-KA 1(disz) u4 ur-pu2 1(disz) u4 u2-u2 dam-mah! 1(disz)# u4 szesz-ki-na szesz-kur-ra# 1(disz@t) u4 lugal-nesag lu2# x x gal-zu
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — BIN 08, 092. 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 (P212640) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
Related tablets
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.