Position in chronology
BIN 08, 030
About this tablet
A tiny Early Dynastic administrative tablet, probably dating to around 2500–2350 BCE, now held at Yale. It records an inventory of different categories of textiles or finished garments — aktum-cloth, a second cloth type qualified by NI, outer-panel pieces, and chest-pieces — and closes with a colophon marking this as a 'new tablet' and a balance figure of thirty-eight. Textile accounting was one of the most intensively documented activities in early Mesopotamian temple and palace archives: even a tablet this small represents real cloth moving through a workshop or storehouse, tallied by a practised scribe. The subtraction notation (20 minus 3, 40 minus 2) is a standard Early Dynastic scribal shorthand, not an error.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Twenty-five aktum-garments. Seventeen NI-type garments (the scribe wrote it as twenty minus three). Eight nig2-bar-ba cloth items. Three chest-panel pieces. This is a new replacement tablet; the outstanding balance carried forward is thirty-eight items (written as forty minus two).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine25 aktum-garments 20 minus 3 NI-garments [= 17] 8 nig2-bar-ba [items] 3 nig2-la2 gaba [chest-pieces] New tablet: 40 minus 2 — balance [= 38]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(u@c) 5(asz@c) aktum 2(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) NI tug2 8(asz@c) nig2-bar-ba 3(asz@c) nig2-la2 gaba dub gibil 4(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) egir
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 030. 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 (P212609) — 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.