Position in chronology
CMAA 020-C0003
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), most likely from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records a short list of commodities or animals — including what appears to be a female goat and several other categorized entries marked by archaic qualifiers — each associated with a numerical count of one. This is among the earliest bureaucratic writing in human history: temple administrators using proto-cuneiform signs to track livestock or rations before fully developed writing existed. The right half of the obverse and much of the reverse are blank or sparsely inscribed, suggesting either the tablet is a partial record or space was reserved for additional entries.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries each record a single unit of a commodity or animal. One entry specifies a female goat of a particular processed or prepared type; another records a similar processed item in a different category; a third links a ration or bread allocation to a specific person or overseer, followed by an unidentified sign. The first and last lines are too damaged to read fully. The reverse shows only a few signs — numerals and simple logograms — partially preserved. The rest is lost or blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N01), [...] X X 1(N01), goat (MASZ2) [processed/fashioned?] (ZATU628~a DIM~a) female (SAL) 1(N01), [NUN~b category] [processed/fashioned?] (DIM~a) 1(N01), [NUN~b category] ration/bread? (GAR) head/person (SAG) [unidentified sign] (ZATU694~c) [...], [...] [...] 6(N01), [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] 1(N01)# , [...] X X 1(N01) , MASZ2 ZATU628~a DIM~a SAL 1(N01) , NUN~b DIM~a 1(N01) , NUN~b GAR SAG ZATU694~c [...] , [...] [...] 6(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CMAA 020-C0003. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: California Museum of Ancient Art, Los Angeles, California, USA (P218054) — 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.