Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 030
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3350–3100 BCE), among the very earliest examples of writing anywhere in the world — a numerical/administrative note, not a sentence in the modern sense. It uses pictographic signs paired with number-marks (impressed circles and wedges) to tally quantities of something involving 'women' (SAL) and people or goods marked with the 'mountain/foreign-land' sign (KUR) — a combination that in later cuneiform became the word for 'female slave,' since captives from foreign lands were classified this way. Young ones (the 'calf' sign, AMAR) and officials (a lord/EN, a temple administrator/SANGA, a scribe/DUB) also appear, suggesting some kind of institutional roster or inventory kept by a temple or palace household. Because the script had not yet evolved to write full grammar, and because the tablet's surface is worn, much of the precise meaning — who or what exactly is being counted — remains genuinely uncertain to scholars.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This looks like an inventory tally kept by an early Mesopotamian institution — a temple or large household — around 3300 BCE. It counts groups of people or goods using number-marks next to picture-signs: nine of one entry marked 'woman'; another dozen-ish entry marked with the sign for 'mountain/foreign land' (likely denoting foreign-born or captive women, the root of the later word for 'female slave'); further small entries pairing 'woman,' 'young/calf,' and the same foreign-land sign with an unidentified compound symbol; a line naming a soapwort or natron commodity; and a closing entry naming officials — a lord, a temple administrator, and a scribe — alongside a further quantity of an unidentified item. The tablet is essentially a set of running totals with attached labels rather than connected prose, and several of its signs are still not confidently deciphered, so parts of what it recorded remain genuinely unclear.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 9 (units, N01-count): woman-sign (SAL) 2. 1 (N14-unit) + 2 (N01-units): 'mountain/foreign-land' sign (KUR) 3. 1 (unit, N01): compound sign |U4×2(N57)|, woman-sign (SAL) 4. 2 (units, N01): 'mountain/foreign-land' sign (KUR), compound sign |U4×2(N57)| 5. 2 (units, N01): 'calf/young' sign (AMAR), 'mountain/foreign-land' sign (KUR), compound sign |U4×1(N57)| 6. natron/soapwort sign (NAGA), [no numeral — label or divider] 7. 2 (N14-units) + 4 (N01-units, sign partly broken): KISZ (category sign, partly broken), PAP (partly broken — total/overseer marker), EN (partly broken — 'lord'/high official), SANGA (temple administrator), DUB (tablet/scribe sign) 8. 2 (N02-units, large capacity measure, sign partly broken): RAD (commodity/category, uncertain)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
9(N01) , SAL 1(N14) 2(N01) , KUR~a 1(N01) , |U4x2(N57)| SAL 2(N01) , KUR~a |U4x2(N57)| 2(N01) , AMAR KUR~a |U4x1(N57)| NAGA~a 2(N14) 4(N01)# , KISZ PAP~a# EN~a# SANGA~a DUB~a 2(N02)# , RAD~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 030. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA (P325164) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.