Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 144
About this tablet
A fragment of one of humanity's earliest accounting documents, from the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), when writing itself was being invented in southern Mesopotamia. The surviving entries record quantities of barley — impressed numeral signs beside the pictograph for grain — assigned to persons or offices whose designations include signs we still cannot read. The tablet is too broken to reconstruct the transaction, but it belongs to the bookkeeping of a large institution managing grain stores some five thousand years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a barley ledger, now shattered. One readable entry logs about twenty measures of barley; another logs ten of some commodity now lost. A third entry records three units against a person or office written with signs meaning something like 'mixed' and 'ration' — probably a title or name we can no longer decipher. Another line held a further twenty-odd measures. Everything else — who received the grain, from whom, and why — has broken away, and the back of the tablet carries no writing.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse; all lines fragmentary) [...] 2 N14 (= 20, or 12 in the grain-capacity system) [...] — barley (ŠE) [...] 1 N14 (= 10, or 6) [...] — [...] [...] — (one illegible sign) [...] — [...] 3 N01 (= 3 units) — HI ("mixed"?) (and) GAR ("ration/deposited"), with the compound signs ZATU714×HI and ZATU651×GAR (unread designation, likely an official's title or name) [...] — [...] [...] 2 N14 (= 20, or 12) [...] [...] — [...] (Remainder of obverse lost; reverse uninscribed or 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
[...] 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-fable-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.