Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 037
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), recording quantities across several commodity or institutional categories and closing with a verified grand total of 52 units. Among the legible entries are salt and what appear to be administrative records or tablets — everyday goods tracked by a temple bureaucracy. Three entries are classified by a sign combining a sun or day-symbol with one, two, or three internal strokes, perhaps indicating sub-grades or processing stages of the same commodity. The arithmetic is internally consistent — every individual entry sums exactly to the stated total — making this one of the earliest surviving examples of double-checked institutional bookkeeping.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet logs eight separate commodity entries that together add up to 52 units. Five units belong to one grade of a sun-marked category, two to a second grade, and six to a third — with another three units of that lowest grade recorded later. There are also 2 administrative tablets or records, and 10 measures of salt. The label on the very first entry and one mid-tablet entry are lost to surface damage. The final line closes the account with the verified total: 52, under a heading that likely names the overseeing official or institutional category.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[18] — [...] (category lost to damage) 5 — [U4×3] category 2 — [U4×2] category 6 — [U4×1] category 2 — tablet(s) / record(s) 10 — salt 6 — [...] (category lost to damage) 3 — [U4×1] category Total: 52 — [grand sum; KISZ PAP~a]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[1(N15)] 8(N02)# , [...] 5(N02) , |U4x3(N57)| 2(N02) , |U4x2(N57)| 6(N02)# , |U4x1(N57)| 2(N02) , DUB~b 1(N15) , MUN~a1 6(N02)# , [...] 3(N02) , |U4x1(N57)| 5(N15)# 2(N02)# , KISZ PAP~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 037. 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 (P325492) — 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.