Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 144
About this tablet
This is a small fragment of an administrative account tablet from the Uruk period, one of the very earliest writing systems in the world, roughly the late fourth millennium BCE. It records numerical entries — quantities of grain and rations — tallied with archaic proto-cuneiform number and commodity signs, some of which (like the compound signs ZATU714 and ZATU651) remain undeciphered even by modern scholars. Such tablets were the bookkeeping tools of early Mesopotamian institutions, tracking the movement of barley, bread, or rations among workers or officials, long before writing was used for literature or law.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives are fragments of a grain and ration ledger. One line records a quantity of 2 units followed by a note about barley, but the surrounding context — who received it, for what purpose — is broken away. Another entry shows 1 unit with the rest lost. A clearer line in the middle gives a figure of 3 units tied to a 'mixed' commodity and a bread or ration allocation, marked with two compound signs whose meaning is not fully understood. The tablet breaks off again after this, and the remaining lines are too damaged to read beyond another partial figure of 2 units near the end.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 2(N14) [...] , barley (ŠE~a) [...] 1(N14) [...] , [...] [...] , X [...] , [...] 3(N01) , HI-mixed(?) GAR-ration |ZATU714×HI~a| |ZATU651×GAR| [...] , [...] [...] 2(N14) [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] 2(N14) [...] , SZE~a [...] 1(N14) [...] , [...] [...] , X [...] , [...] 3(N01) , HI@g~a GAR |ZATU714xHI@g~a| |ZATU651xGAR| [...] , [...] [...] 2(N14) [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 144. 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 (P325229) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.