Position in chronology
BIN 08, 016
About this tablet
A bookkeeping tablet from Girsu (present-day Tello, southern Iraq), written during the Early Dynastic III period, around 2500–2350 BCE. A temple scribe recorded barley going out — measured in large-gur capacity units — to several named individuals and one institution, the Vine-House, probably a winery or wine-cellar storehouse attached to a temple estate; it alone receives fifteen gur, far more than any individual. This is the unglamorous daily paperwork of Sumerian administrative life: a record impressed into wet clay, then left to dry as a permanent receipt. Several recipient names in the lower portion of the tablet are partially damaged or uncertain.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Five large-gur measures of barley go to Ur-en-sig-nun-na. Two gur of ma-mud — commodity unclear. A partially broken line records an uncertain amount of [head-grade?] barley. Five gur of barley to Me-me-a. Fifteen gur to the Vine-House storehouse. Two gur to Nin-mu-gin7-a-mah, and four gur to Ili-ili. The remaining lines are too damaged to read fully; what survives preserves partial names: Nu-SAHAR-a and Ma-ma-kishi-gal.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 large-gur (gur-saggal) of barley — Ur-en-sig-nun-na; 2 [large-gur,] ma-mud; [...]-sag, barley; 5 [large-gur] of barley — Me-me-a; 15 gur — the Vine-House (E₂-geštin-su₁₃); 2 [gur] — Nin-mu-gin₇-a-mah; 2 + 2 [gur] — Ili-ili; [...]-HAR; [...] (broken); Nu-SAHAR-a; Ma-ma-kišī-gal.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
5(asz@c) sze gur saggal ur#-en-sig#?-nun-na# 2(asz@c)#? ma#-mud [x]-sag sze 5(asz@c) sze me-me-a 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) gur e2-gesztin-su13 2(asz@c) nin-mu-gin7#-a-mah 2(asz@c) 2(asz@c) i3-li2-li2 [...]-HAR [...]-x-x nu-SAHAR-a# ma#?-ma-kiszi17-gal#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 016. 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 (P221543) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.