Position in chronology
BIN 08, 083
About this tablet
A compact administrative tablet from the Early Dynastic (Fara) period, roughly 2600–2500 BCE, recording the allocation of workers or commodity units across a small set of named officials and institutional roles. Three personal names appear — En-a-kal-le, Ur-ni, and En-tar-si — alongside two supervisory titles (overseer-foreman and overseer), sketching a simple hierarchy of labor or supply management. The opening entry, 54 units of fodder-grass, may be a commodity consignment tied to the official named directly below it, while the remaining entries track worker counts in the low dozens. Small rounded tablets of this shape and brevity are the everyday paperwork of Sumerian city administration — a single transaction or shift-roster, pressed in clay and filed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
En-a-kal-le is responsible for 54 bundles of grass. Thirty-five workers are assigned to quay-construction. Ur-ni oversees 40; En-tar-si, 42. The overseer-foreman commands 36 (the number is slightly damaged on the tablet), and the overseer, 32½. That is the complete record — seven terse entries capturing one moment in an Early Dynastic administrative office.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine54 [bundles of] fodder-grass — En-a-kal-le; 35, quay construction; 40, Ur-ni; 42, En-tar-si; 3[6], overseer-foreman; 32½, overseer.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
5(u) 4(disz@t) u2 sa en-a2-kal-le 3(u) 5(disz@t) kar du3 4(u) ur2-ni 4(u) 2(disz@t) en-tar-si 3(u)# 6(disz@t) ugula nu-banda3 3(u) 2(disz@t) 1/2(disz) ugula
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — BIN 08, 083. 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 (P221566) — 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.