Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 217
About this tablet
This is an accounting tablet in proto-cuneiform, the earliest stage of writing, made in southern Mesopotamia around 3200–3000 BCE. It is now at Cornell University, and where it was found is unknown. Each small box on the tablet pairs a number, pressed in with the round end of a stylus, with a sign for a commodity, a category or a person. One entry seems to involve grain. The tablet is too broken, and too little of it has been read, to say what exactly was being counted. Still, it shows how early bookkeepers set out their records in neat grids of boxes.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a list of amounts, each written in tens. One entry is fifty of something, now lost. Another is thirty, apparently of a kind of grain. There is a second entry of thirty, where the item's name can't be read, and two entries of twenty whose items are missing. Near the end, an entry names someone or something with a word that may mean 'head' or 'chief', but the rest breaks off. Many other lines are too damaged to read. The back of the tablet has another number and a few signs, but they have not been read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse (column structure not marked in the transliteration) 1. [...] 5 tens (5 N14) [...], [...] 2. 3 tens (3 N14): ŠE~a.NAM2 (a grain-related entry) 3. [...], [...] 4. [...], [...] 5. 3 tens (3 N14): [an unidentified sign] [...] 6. [...], [...] 7. 2 tens (2 N14) [...], [...] 8. 2 tens (2 N14) [...], [...] 9. [...]: GIR3@g~b, head (SAG) [...] 10. [...], [...] (The transliteration gives nothing for the reverse. See reasoning.)
Our translation engine — Opus 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
[...] 5(N14)# , [...] 3(N14) , |SZE~a.NAM2| [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 3(N14)# , X [...] [...] , [...] 2(N14) [...] , [...] 2(N14)# [...] , [...] [...] , GIR3@g~b SAG# [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 217. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Rare Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York, USA (P006350) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.