Some Cattle Math

UET 5, 849 is a little tablet that accounts for the inspection of cattle seized by 8 ranchers, totaling 16,803 cattle, or about 2,000 cattle per representative. This is a ton of cattle, right? Yes, it's so much cattle (several tons worth).

Roughly 1% of cattle farms in the US house over 1,000 cattle. When the South Fork Dairy Farm lost 18,000 cows due to a mechanical failure, this wiped out 3% of Texas's total dairy cows, or 20% of the cows killed for meat on any given day. We're looking at so much cattle, even by today's standards.

Marc van de Mieroop said "we have no idea what these numbers mean." For the Ur III period (2100-2000 BCE), we estimated cattle sacrifice to be from 40-120 oxen per month, or less than 10% of this number. I have no reason to suspect that these numbers were inflated or referred to anything but cattle.