Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 107
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period in southern Iraq, roughly 3200–3000 BCE, tracking quantities of female personnel or female-category commodities described as 'mixed,' alongside entries tied to the city-institution of Uruk and a grouping of assembly, persons (or stones), and fish. The repeated TA~c SAL HI entry across lines 2 and 5 suggests a running multi-entry ledger — exactly the kind of tightly formatted accounting record the early Mesopotamian temple bureaucracy produced in enormous numbers to track labor and goods. Though the opening and closing lines are broken away, the surviving cells preserve enough to identify this as a multi-category commodity or personnel allocation record, probably generated within or for one of Uruk's great institutional households.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is broken at the top and bottom, so the opening and closing entries are lost. What survives records at least four line-items: 20 units of female workers (or female-category goods) classified as 'mixed'; 3(N19) units under a heading connected to Uruk; a compound quantity against an entry grouping an institutional assembly, persons or stones, and fish; and then 2 further units again designated as female, mixed. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] | [...] [...,] 20 | female [personnel], mixed [...,] 3(N19) | [heading]: Uruk 1(N04) 1(N41) | assembly — person/stone — fish 2(N41) | female [personnel], mixed [...] | [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] 2(N14) , TA~c SAL HI [...] 3(N19) , PAP~a# UNUG~a 1(N04) 1(N41) , UKKIN~a NA~a KU6~a 2(N41) , TA~c SAL HI [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 107. 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 (P325758) — 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.