Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 146
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the late fourth millennium BCE), one of the very earliest phases of writing anywhere in the world. It is an administrative or economic record — a set of case-divided entries pairing numerals with commodity or personnel signs, of the kind temple or institutional accountants used to track goods, rations, or workers. The surviving lines mention what looks like a consumed or disbursed quantity of a commodity (possibly natron/soapwort) overseen by senior 'sanga' officials — temple administrators — but so much of the tablet is missing or eroded that the exact transaction cannot be reconstructed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This damaged early accounting tablet records a series of numbered entries, most now lost to breaks in the clay. One line notes a quantity of five units tied to a sign read as DU8, another six units of something unreadable, and a further entry combining two numeral notations with an unidentified sign. A better-preserved line records that a quantity of a commodity (perhaps natron or a similar substance) was consumed or issued, apparently under the authority of senior temple administrators ('sanga' officials, one called 'great'). The tablet breaks off before and after this line, and the remaining fragments — a numeral followed by lost text, then a partly preserved sign 'TE' — are too incomplete to interpret further.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [...] , [...] 5(N01) , DU8~c@g 6(N01) [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) , X GU7 NAGA~a |U4x1(N01)| SANGA~a SANGA~a GAL~a (Break) 1(N24~b) , [...] [...] , TE [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 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-sonnet-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.