Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 199
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet fragment from the Uruk period (roughly the late 4th millennium BCE), one of the very earliest forms of writing. It is an administrative or economic account — a list of numbered entries paired with short labels that seem to name categories of personnel, goods, or officials (a 'vizier'/sukkal-type office, a workforce term, a 'woman' designation). Because so little of the tablet survives, we cannot reconstruct what institution kept this record or what exactly was being counted, but it belongs to the broader genre of Uruk-period bookkeeping tablets that tracked labor, rations, or commodities for an early city administration.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a fragment of an ancient tally sheet. The readable parts record small counts — one unit here, two units there — set against short category words that may mean something like 'upland delivery,' 'the minister/official,' 'workforce,' 'a delivery involving three (units) and a woman,' and 'a well/pit.' Most of the tablet's beginning, several full lines, and its ending are broken away and lost, so the overall transaction it once documented cannot be reconstructed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N01), [...] [...], [...] 1(N01), NIM~a 2(N01), SUKKAL [...], ERIN(#, damaged) [...], [...] 2(N01), DU 3(N57) SAL 2(N01), PU2(#?) [...] 1(N01)(#) [...], [...]
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(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01) , NIM~a 2(N01) , SUKKAL [...] , ERIN# [...] , [...] 2(N01) , DU 3(N57) SAL 2(N01) , PU2#? [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 199. 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 (P325170) — 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.