Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 174
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from the very first centuries of writing — proto-cuneiform, around 3200–3000 BCE, before the script recorded language in a way we can fully read. The signs that survive belong to the world of institutional bookkeeping: a temple administrator (SANGA), fish, a bird, a courtyard, a household or estate, a jar. Someone was tallying goods moving through a temple household, but the notation is so early and the tablet so damaged — a crack runs clean across it and the back is almost entirely worn away — that the transaction itself can no longer be reconstructed. It is a fragment of the accounting habit out of which writing itself grew.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The front of the tablet lists entries under a temple administrator, opening with a quantity of five (in one of the early numeral systems), followed by a time or day notation. Then come the items: fish, delivered to or from the courtyard; a bird, and a household or estate; a horn, and a further category sign; an entry under a lord; and a group of signs ending with a jar and a place-name or location marker. The next line is broken on both sides, with only the sign ŠU intact. Below that the surface gives out — two signs are unreadable, and the last line preserves only two more. The back of the tablet is effectively blank to the eye.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. 5(N47) — the temple administrator (SANGA~a); |U₄ × 3(N57)| 2. (no number) — fish (KU6~a); the courtyard (KISAL~b1) 3. bird (MUŠEN); the house/estate (E2~a) 4. SI (horn); ME~a 5. EN~a (the lord); NE~a 6. BU~a; PAP~a; NAM2 7. |LAGAB~b + LAGAB~b|; jar (DUG~a); place (KI) 8. [...] ŠU [...] (Surface broken and effaced) 9. (two illegible signs) 10. TE; RU
Our translation engine — Opus 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(N47) , SANGA~a# |U4x3(N57)| , KU6~a KISAL~b1 MUSZEN# E2~a SI ME~a EN~a NE~a BU~a PAP~a NAM2 |LAGAB~b+LAGAB~b| DUG~a KI [...] SZU# [...] X X TE# RU#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 174. 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 (P325162) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.