Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 118
About this tablet
One of the earliest administrative records ever made, this small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE) predates readable language — its script, proto-cuneiform, was a bookkeeping notation before it was a writing system. The surviving entries appear to track quantities of rations or bread allocations, organized by some unit of time or category, in the style of the massive institutional storehouses that fed early Sumerian cities. The tablet is heavily damaged, with large portions broken away, and one of its central signs (catalogued only by number) remains undeciphered by modern scholarship. Even so, the entries that survive are recognizable as the direct ancestor of every later bureaucratic ledger.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is a series of accounting entries: one unit of something (the commodity is lost), then a heading or category line whose key sign cannot be read, paired with words meaning 'inner contents' and 'year' or 'name' — the rest of that line is broken. Further down, single and double units are recorded against entries for bread rations tied to a field enclosure, and to a day or time period. Then three larger measures appear, their commodity description broken away, followed by one more large measure whose context is also lost. The rest is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[broken] | [broken] [broken] | [broken] 1 [unit] | [commodity: broken] [undeciphered sign (ZATU714)] [inner contents/store] [year/name] [broken] [broken] | [unknown sign] [broken] [...] 1 [unit] | [ration/bread allocation] [enclosure-unit] 2 [units] | [day/period] [ration/bread allocation] 3 [larger measures] | [broken] [...] 1 [larger measure] | [broken]
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) , [...] ZATU714# SZA3~a1# MU [...] [...] , X [...] [...] 1(N01) , GAR LAGAB~b 2(N01) , U4 GAR 3(N14) , [...] [...] 1(N14) , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 118. 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 (P325763) — 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.