Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 157
About this tablet
This small clay tablet is a proto-cuneiform administrative record from the Uruk period, roughly 3100–2900 BCE — among the very earliest writing on earth, using pictographic signs and tally marks rather than full sentences. It appears to be a bookkeeping list tracking quantities of fish and other goods, connected to an institutional official called the 'sanga' and to facilities called the 'byre/cattle-pen' and 'courtyard,' likely part of a temple or palace household economy. Many of the individual signs (labeled here with their catalog numbers, e.g. ZATU710) still resist confident translation, because this writing system predates fully phonetic script and much of its vocabulary remains under active scholarly reconstruction.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tally sheet, not a narrative. It lists: 4 units of fish and another commodity; 3 units of a compound item; an entry naming the administrator responsible for the cattle-pen; 1-plus-1 units tied to a 'day' marker and rations or bread; another 1-plus-1 units of fish stored in or issued from a courtyard; 1 unit connected to the cattle-pen; and finally 2 units of a further commodity pairing. In short, it is a short accounting note — probably fish and rations being counted, stored, or distributed under the oversight of a temple or household official — but because several of the pictographic signs used here have never been securely deciphered, the exact goods and transaction type cannot be pinned down with certainty.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) 1. 4 (N39a units): fish (KU6) — [sign] ZATU710 2. 3 (N39a units): [compound sign] ZATU714×HI(g) — ME 3. sanga (administrator) — TUR3 (cattle-pen/byre) 4. 1 (N39a) + 1 (N24) units: U4 (day/sun sign) — GAR (rations/bread) 5. 1 (N39a) + 1 (N24) units: [sign] ZATU710 — fish (KU6) — kisal (courtyard/storage compound) 6. 1 (N14 unit): TUR3 (cattle-pen/byre) — ME 7. 2 (N01 units): [sign] ZATU710 — HAL — [compound sign] ZATU714×HI(g)
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
4(N39~a)# , KU6~a ZATU710 3(N39~a)# , |ZATU714xHI@g~a| ME~a SANGA~a TUR3~b 1(N39~a) 1(N24) , U4 GAR 1(N39~a)# 1(N24) , ZATU710 KU6~a KISAL~b1 1(N14)# , TUR3~b ME~a 2(N01) , ZATU710# HAL# |ZATU714xHI@g~a|
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 157. 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 (P325068) — 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.