Position in chronology
BIN 08, 065
About this tablet
An Early Dynastic land register from southern Mesopotamia, written on a small stone-hard clay tablet now in Yale's Babylonian Collection. It lists parcels of farmland — measured in iku and eše, the standard Sumerian units of area — set against the names of the men who held or worked them, several identified by profession: a lamentation-priest, an overseer, a rope-twiner, a shepherd. Documents like this are the bookkeeping backbone of the earliest Sumerian city-states, showing how temple or palace estates parcelled out fields among their dependents around 2400 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A survey of field plots with the people assigned to them. Ama-bara-abzu holds two and a quarter iku. Si-du is credited with three separate parcels: just under three iku, three and a half, and three and a quarter. Ur-namnun has one eše and four iku; Ur-tulbaza, a lamentation-priest, one eše and one and a half iku; Lugal-a-…, two eše and four iku. Magur, apparently a foreman, is down for about one eše and two and a half iku of a category written LIŠ-uš. Enlila the rope-twiner has two and a half iku of the same category plus one and a half iku of barley land, totalling four and a half iku. Amar-gula the shepherd closes the list with nearly five iku, three measures of barley and two of LIŠ-uš. Several of the technical labels and one personal name remain obscure.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2¼ iku of field — eš-ba(?); Ama-bara-abzu. 3 iku less ¼ iku; 3½ iku; 3¼ iku — Si-du. 1 eše 4 iku — Ur-namnun. 1 eše 1½ iku — Ur-tulbaza, the lamentation-priest (gala). 2 eše 4 iku — Lugal-a-REC107. 1 eše 2½ iku(?), LIŠ-uš — Magur(?), the overseer(?). 2½ iku, LIŠ-uš; 1½ iku barley; 4 (units) — total: 4½ iku, uš — Enlila, the rope-twiner (gu-sur). 5 iku less ¼ iku; 3 (units) barley; 2 (units) LIŠ-uš — Amar-gula, the shepherd.
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
2(iku@c) 1/4(iku@c) GAN2# esz16-ba? ama-bara2-abzu 3(iku@c) la2 1/4(iku@c) 3(iku@c) 1/2(iku@c) 3(iku@c) 1/4(iku@c) si-du3 1(esze3@c) 4(iku@c) ur-nam2-nun 1(esze3@c) 1(iku@c) 1/2(iku@c) ur-tul2-ba-za gala 2(esze3@c)# 4(iku@c) lugal-a2-REC107 1(esze3@c) 2(iku@c) 1/2(iku@c)? lisz us2 ma2-gur8 ugula? 2(iku@c) 1/2(iku@c) lisz us2 1(iku@c) 1/2(iku@c) sze 4 (asz@c) pap 4(iku@c) 1/2(iku@c) us2 en-lil2-la2 gu:sur 5(iku@c) la2 1/4(iku@c) 3(asz@c) sze 2(asz@c) lisz us2 amar-gu2-la2 sipa
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 065. 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 (P221562) — 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.