Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 315
About this tablet
A numerical drill tablet from Adab in southern Iraq, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2600–2350 BCE). A student scribe filled nine ruled rows on the obverse with repeated impressions of the Sumerian sign for 'ten' — the basic unit of the sexagesimal counting system — pressing the same circular mark into damp clay again and again until the face of the tablet was full. The reverse is too eroded to read. Tablets like this are among the earliest evidence of structured numerical education anywhere in the world: a child or young apprentice drilling the physical gesture of number-writing, one impression at a time, just as a pupil today might fill a page with handwriting practice.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Ten. Ten. Ten. Ten. Ten. Ten — the same number, pressed into the clay fifty-four times across nine ruled rows. Someone was practicing. They covered the front of this small tablet entirely with the numeral ten, row after row in a neat grid, and then stopped. The back of the tablet is too worn and damaged to make out what, if anything, was written there. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineRow 1: 10 10 10 10 10 10 Row 2: 10 10 10 10 10 10 Row 3: 10 10 10 10 10 10 Row 4: 10 10 10 10 10 10 Row 5: 10 10 10 10 10 10 Row 6: 10 10 10 10 10 10 Row 7: 10 10 10 10 10 10 Row 8: 10 10 10 10 10 10 Row 9: 10 10 10 [10] 10 10
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(u)# 1(u)# 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u)# 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) 1(u) [1(u)] 1(u)# 1(u)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 315. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P251612) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.