Position in chronology
BIN 08, 040
About this tablet
A livestock inventory tablet from Early Dynastic Isin (southern Iraq), recording a small herd of twelve cattle broken down by sex, age, and nursing status — seven adult mother cows, two three-year-olds, a two-year-old bull, and two nursing calves. The reverse names four individuals who were almost certainly the officials responsible for the animals or the witnesses to the count. Tablets like this one are the day-to-day paperwork of Mesopotamian institutional herding: a scribe at a temple or estate taking stock of the animals under his office's care, verifying the tally, and noting who was accountable.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The herd stands at twelve head of cattle: seven adult cows, two cows aged three, one bull aged two, a nursing female calf, and a nursing male calf — twelve animals in total. Four men are named on the back of the tablet: Ur-likam, Uʾuma, Ansi, and Mazauma. They are the people responsible for — or bearing witness to — this count.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine7 mother cows 2 cows, 3 years old 1 bull, 2 years old 1 female suckling calf 1 male suckling calf Total thereof: 12 Ur-likam Uʾuma Ansi Mazauma
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
7(asz@c) ab2 ama 2(asz@c) ab2 mu 3(disz@t) 1(asz@c) gu4# mu 2(disz@t) 1(asz@c) amar munus ga 1(asz@c) amar gu4 ga szu-nigin2-bi3 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) ur-li-kam u3-um-a an-si ma-za-um-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 040. 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 (P212617) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.