Counting Sheep in Sumer

The tablets pictured come from Puzrish-Dagan, the site of a livestock-processing bureau on the Euphrates River in south-central Mesopotamia.

A Sumerian accounting record typically begins with the object of transaction, then says who performed what type of transaction, and concludes with the date of the record. On the left edge the scribe would often summarize the tablet’s content. Even the tiniest tablet is dated!

Because the years were named, not numbered, these date formulae serve to inform us about some of the important events that happened year by year.

Periodically, all the little tablets in each bureau were collected, and the information was transferred from them onto large summary tablets, like this balanced account statement, which records incoming and outgoing sheep and goats for a ten-day period during year 8 of Amar-Suen’s reign.