Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 202
About this tablet
This is a small, badly worn proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the late 4th millennium BCE), one of the earliest kinds of writing known — essentially a bookkeeping tag rather than a narrative text. Each line pairs a numeral with a commodity or institution: a woman receiving something, a delivery connected to a 'House of the Tigris', and an entry involving beer. Tablets like this recorded rations, goods, or deliveries tracked by early Mesopotamian temple or palace administrators, and their terse, list-like format is the ancestor of all later cuneiform accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary account tablet. It records a quantity of some commodity — possibly water or a liquid measure — issued into the hands of a woman. Several following entries are lost. Later lines note one unit connected with an institution called the 'House of the Tigris,' and another unit of beer handed out or associated with some further (now unclear) qualifier. The tablet breaks off again, and the last surviving line lists a string of short terms — possibly fuel, a delivery notation, and a category marker — whose exact administrative meaning cannot be recovered from what remains.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [...] 1(N39a) [unit], water(?) — into the hand of — a woman [...], [...] 1(N01) [unit], [2 illegible signs] 1(N01) [unit], PAP-official/total(?) [+1 illegible sign] [...] 1(N01) [unit], [...] [...], [...] (Reverse) 1(N01) [unit], House of the Tigris 1(N01) [unit], beer — [illegible sign] — BUa (disbursed/plant?) [...], [...] NEa(?) — DU (delivered/in transit) — TE — BUa
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(N39~a)# , A# SZU2# SAL [...] , [...] 1(N01) , X X 1(N01) , PAP~a# X [...] 1(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01) , E2~a IDIGNA 1(N01) , KASZ~a X BU~a [...] , [...] NE~a# DU TE BU~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 202. 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 (P325159) — 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.