Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 136
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative account from the Uruk period, around 3200 BCE — among the very oldest written documents in existence, from the first centuries of writing itself. The tablet records quantities, most likely of grain or a related commodity, measured in the archaic numerical system and set against categories or recipients, one of them marked with the 'lion' sign and a distribution marker. It is bookkeeping, not literature: the surviving evidence of an early Mesopotamian institution counting and handing out its goods.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger, most of it lost. The first surviving entry logs one large unit plus four small measures of some commodity, though what it was for is broken away. Three lines are gone entirely. Then the accountant notes two units and one measure under the category written with the 'lion' sign, marked as distributed, and one more unit of a 'mixed' grade. The rest of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) Line 1: 1(N01) 4(N39a) — [entry lost] Line 2: [...] — [...] Line 3: [...] — [...] Line 4: [...] — [...] Line 5: 2(N42a) 1(N25) — PIRIG, allotted (BA) Line 6: 1(N01) — HI ('mixed'?) Line 7: [...] — [...]
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(N01) 4(N39~a) , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N42~a) 1(N25) , PIRIG~b1# BA 1(N01) , HI [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 136. 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 (P325760) — 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.