Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 130
About this tablet
A fragment of one of the world's oldest written documents: a proto-cuneiform administrative account from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), before writing could record full sentences. It lists quantities — mostly small fractional measures, probably of grain or a grain product — against terse commodity signs such as NE, HI ('mixed'?), and MAR, whose exact meanings are still debated. The tablet is badly broken: every entry has lost its beginning, and the reverse is worn smooth. Even so, it shows bookkeeping — not literature — as the engine that drove the invention of writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a page from an ancient ledger, and only the middle of it survives. Each surviving line pairs a quantity with a product code: one line records ten units of something labeled with the NE sign; another totals up a string of small fractional measures — roughly a series of part-units of grain — tagged as 'mixed' stock; a third notes a single small fraction against the item MAR; a fourth records one unit plus two fractional measures of something now lost. The top and bottom of the account are broken away, and the back of the tablet is too eroded to read, so we cannot tell whose goods these were or where they were going.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse (beginning of text broken) [...] ... [...] [...] 1(N14) [= 10 units] , HI×1(N57) NE [...] 1(N42a) 1(N25) 1(N28c) 1(N30a) [fractional measures] , 1(N57) HI-gunû ("mixed"?) [...] 1(N28) [fractional measure] , MAR [...] 1(N05) 2(N42a) [...] , [...] (remainder broken; reverse uninscribed/effaced)
Our translation engine — Fable 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
[...] , [...] [...] 1(N14) , |HIx1(N57)|# NE~a [...] 1(N42~a) 1(N25) 1(N28~c) 1(N30~a) , 1(N57) HI@g~a [...] 1(N28) , MAR~a [...] 1(N05) 2(N42~a) [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 130. 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 (P325240) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.