Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 138
About this tablet
One of the world's earliest written documents: a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period, around 3300–3000 BCE, before writing could record connected speech. A bookkeeper tallied goods in ruled boxes — jars, metal cauldrons, food portions, fish, and a count of persons — apparently items being distributed or inventoried by one of the great early urban institutions. The right half of the tablet was left blank and the reverse is almost entirely worn away, so the transaction's full scope is lost, but it is a direct window onto the accounting needs that gave birth to writing itself.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a stocklist. It counts ten vessels or implements of a special type, two jars of a particular grade, two metal cauldrons, one more jar, one-plus units of something written with the 'mound' sign, five-plus persons, and two portions of prepared food. A damaged line seems to mark the lot as allotted or distributed. After a gap, a final broken entry mentions fish, but the quantities and the rest of the record are lost to erosion.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 10 (1(N14)): LAGAB׊A-vessels(?), LAGAB׊ITA-implements(?) 2 (2(N01)): jars (of the DUG~c×1(N58) type) 2 (2(N01)): ŠEN metal vessels (cauldrons) 1 (1(N01)): jar (DUG~a) 1 and a fraction (1(N01) 1(N26)): DU6 (mound/heap[?]) 5 and a fraction (5(N01) 1(N29~a)): persons (SAG, 'heads') 2 (2(N01)) [...]: food portions (GAR) ...(?) AN — allotted (BA) (Break) [...] fish (KU6~a) [...]
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) , |LAGAB~axSZA|# |LAGAB~axSZITA~a1| 2(N01) , |DUG~cx1(N58)| 2(N01) , SZEN~a# 1(N01) , DUG~a# 1(N01)# 1(N26) , DU6~a 5(N01)# 1(N29~a)# , SAG 2(N01)# [...] , GAR# X? AN# BA [...] , KU6~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 138. 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 (P325195) — 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.