Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 188
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the earliest writing systems ever used. It appears to record the distribution or consumption of beer and associated commodities across several entries, each linked to a quantity and what may be an official title or institutional designation. Tablets like this are among the very first written documents in human history — not literature or law, but the practical bookkeeping of a large temple or palace economy in ancient southern Iraq. The signs are highly pictographic and not yet fully decipherable in all their details.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records several commodity entries: one large unit associated with a high official or qualifier and a time/quantity marker (the rest of that line is broken); one unit assigned to a lord or senior official with a count of 3; one unit linked to an overseer at a city or settlement, tied to a beer-festival entry with a day-count of 4; and finally a consumption or ration entry for beer with a day-count of 6. The middle of the tablet is too damaged to read fully.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N05) [units]: GAL (large/great) X |U4×1(N57)| [...] 1(N05) [units]: EN (lord/official) 3(N57) [...] 1(N05) [units]: PA (overseer?) URU (city/settlement) |EZEN×KASZ| |U4×4(N57)| GU7 (consumption/ration): |EZEN×KASZ| |U4×6(N57)|
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(N05) , GAL~a# X |U4x1(N57)|# [...] 1(N05) , EN2 3(N57) [...] 1(N05) , PA~a URU~a1 |EZEN~axKASZ~b| |U4x4(N57)| GU7# |EZEN~axKASZ~b|# |U4x6(N57)|#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 188. 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 (P325742) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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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.