Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 184
About this tablet
This is a small fragment of an administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the earliest writing systems in human history. It records numerical quantities alongside pictographic entries — a foot or dagger sign, a 'musician' sign, references to silver, a city, a guard or dog-handler, and a 'lord' or high official — the kind of terse bookkeeping entries used to track goods, labor, or personnel in an early Mesopotamian institution. Much of the tablet is broken away, so the overall transaction it recorded cannot be fully reconstructed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken accounting tablet lists a series of quantities next to short notations, in the style of the very earliest Mesopotamian bookkeeping. One entry records a quantity tied to a sign that may mean 'foot' or 'dagger,' paired with an otherwise unknown sign. Another records a smaller quantity linked to a 'musician' and a further sign. The middle of the tablet is lost. A further entry ties one quantity to signs that may read 'silver,' 'city,' and 'guard' or 'dog-handler,' and another ties five units to a place called 'the city' and to a 'lord' or high official. The tablet breaks off again, and the final surviving line preserves only a few damaged, unreadable signs.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N45) 4(N14), GIR3 (foot/toe or dagger) ZATU773 1(N45) 1(N14), NAR (musician) A [...], [...] 1(N45), ME KU3 (silver) URU UR 5(N14), URU×KI EN (lord) [...], [...] [...], X X (unidentified signs)
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
1(N45) 4(N14) , GIR3@g~b ZATU773~a 1(N45) 1(N14) , NAR A [...] , [...] 1(N45) , ME~a KU3~a# URU~a1# UR~a 5(N14) , |URU~a1xKI|# EN~a [...] , [...] [...] , X X X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 184. 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 (P325761) — 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.