Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 182
About this tablet
This small clay fragment is a piece of proto-cuneiform bookkeeping from the Uruk period (roughly 3350–3100 BCE), among the very earliest writing on earth. It is not a story or a letter but an accounting record: rows of boxed entries pairing a numeral sign with a commodity or institutional sign — cloth, sheep, fish, and repeated references to a 'cattle-stall' or storage institution (AB) and disbursement (BA). Much of the vocabulary still resists confident translation because the sign system predates the Sumerian language proper as we can read it; scholars reconstruct meaning by comparing thousands of similar tablets from the Uruk archive.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an inventory or disbursement ledger. It lists, box by box, small quantities of goods handed out under official record: one unit of cloth, one unit of some fish or animal commodity, one sheep, another portion of fish — each tied to a numeral and what looks like an institutional marker for a storehouse or cattle-pen, alongside a mark meaning something like 'disbursed.' Partway through the text breaks off; when it resumes, it records more numbered entries — two units of one commodity, four of a compound sign representing some tool or measure, then two more units before the tablet is broken away entirely. The overall impression is of a clerk ticking off allocations from a central store, though many of the specific goods named cannot be identified with certainty today.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] — cattle-stall/institutional entry (AB) 1 (N08 unit): AN, disbursed (BA), cloth (TUG2) 1 (N01 unit): sign ZATU776, base/root (UR2) 1 (N01 unit): sheep (UDU) 1 (N01 unit): carp/fish (SUHUR) ZATU776, cattle-stall (AB), MU (year/name) [...] , [...] (break) 1 (N14 unit): X, [...] cattle-stall (AB), AN, disbursed (BA) 1 (N14 unit): LAGABxSZITA-sign, LAGABxSZITA-sign (doubled) 2 (N01 unit): sign ZATU710, field-enclosure sign (LAGAB), mixed/HI field-enclosure sign (LAGAB), city (URU), AN, disbursed (BA) [...] , [...] (break) 4 (N01 unit): LAGABxSZITA-sign 2 (N01 unit): [...] (break)
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
[...] , AB~a 1(N08) , AN BA TUG2~a 1(N01) , ZATU776# UR2 1(N01) , UDU~a 1(N01) , SUHUR ZATU776 AB~a MU [...] , [...] 1(N14) , X [...] AB~a AN BA 1(N14) , |LAGAB~axSZITA~a1| |LAGAB~axSZITA~a1| 2(N01) , ZATU710 LAGAB~b HI@g~a LAGAB~b URU~a1 AN BA [...] , [...] 4(N01)# , |LAGAB~axSZITA~a1| 2(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 182. 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 (P325752) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-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.