Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 135
About this tablet
An administrative account from the Uruk period (late 4th millennium BCE), among the very oldest written documents in the world — written before cuneiform could record connected speech. Its entries pair numerical impressions with word-signs for barley, a field, a city, and twice an 'en' — the lord or priest-ruler who headed the great household institutions of early Mesopotamia. It is bookkeeping at the dawn of writing: quantities allotted or delivered under institutional authority, though the tablet is too broken to reconstruct the full transaction.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger, not prose. The readable entries say roughly: a quantity of barley was distributed; one unit is booked against a field deposited(?) to the city; three units against the border district; one unit against the lord (the 'en'), covering a delivery that included wood, fish, reed bundles, and precious metal; and one more unit against the lord for a further delivery involving a junior party. The last three lines of the account, and whatever stood in the opening entry's number, are broken away and cannot be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] barley — allotted; 1 (N01 unit) — field, deposited(?), ... (UR2), the city; 3 (N57 units) — ... (ŠU2), the border district(?); 1 (N01 unit) — the en (lord/priest-ruler): delivery(?); wood, carp(?), reed-bundle(s), ... (GIŠ3), overseer(?)-mark, precious metal, water(?), ... (sign unclear); 1 (N01 unit) — the en: ..., delivery(?), small/junior ..., [...]; (Break) [...] — [...] [...] — [...] [...] — [...] (remainder of the tablet lost or illegible)
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
[...] , SZE~a BA 1(N01)# , GAN2 RU UR2 URU~a1 3(N57) SZU2 ZAG~a 1(N01) , EN~a DU# GISZ SUHUR# GI GISZ3~a PA~a KU3~a A X 1(N01) , EN~a A DU# TUR X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 135. 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 (P325072) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.