Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 146
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE — the very dawn of writing, before cuneiform could record connected sentences. It lists counted quantities of goods (5, 6, 11 units and a small fractional measure) that were consumed or disbursed under the authority of temple administrators, one of them a 'chief' administrator, apparently on a specific day. Tablets like this show that writing was invented not for literature or prayer but for bookkeeping: tracking commodities moving through the great household institutions of southern Mesopotamia. The tablet is badly broken, so the identities of most of the goods are lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger entry, mostly broken. The first line is lost. Then: five units of a processed commodity; six units of something now illegible; eleven units of another unreadable item. A summary note records that the goods were consumed or disbursed — with a reference to NAGA (perhaps a substance or a category) — on day one, under the temple administrator and the chief temple administrator. One further entry records a small fractional measure of something lost in the break. The final surviving line preserves only a single sign, TE, before the tablet breaks off entirely.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] : [...] 5 (units) : DU8 (a processed product) 6 (units) : [...] 11 (units) : (illegible commodity) consumed/disbursed — NAGA — 'day 1' — the temple administrator (and) the chief temple administrator 1 (small fractional measure, N24) : [...] (reverse/final section) [...] : TE [...] (rest broken)
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
[...] , [...] 5(N01) , DU8~c@g 6(N01) [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) , X GU7 NAGA~a |U4x1(N01)| SANGA~a SANGA~a GAL~a 1(N24~b) , [...] [...] , TE# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 146. 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 (P325241) — 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.