Position in chronology
CUSAS 31, 047
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet fragment from the Uruk period (roughly 3350–3100 BCE), among the very earliest writing on earth — proto-cuneiform, recorded not in words but in numeral notations and pictographic signs organized into ruled cases. It appears to be an institutional accounting record, tallying quantities of livestock (a she-goat), possibly a plow or plow-team, and goods or personnel under the oversight of an EN, a high-ranking official or temple head. Such tablets were the bookkeeping backbone of the first cities in southern Mesopotamia, tracking the flow of animals, grain, and labor through a temple or palace household. The tablet is badly broken, so only isolated numbers and sign-groups survive rather than a connected account.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The beginning of this record is lost. What survives are a few accounting lines: a quantity marked '1 (N14)', then '1 (N14), 2 (units)' next to a sign group that may read as a supervisor's mark or heading, followed by the title-sign for a lord or official combined with a qualifying mark (NUN). The next line is too damaged to read clearly, possibly naming a different item or material. Then comes '2 units' associated with a plow or plow-team, and '1 unit' of a she-goat. After another gap, the tablet lists '1 (N15)' and closes with a label reading KISZ, whose exact administrative meaning — an animal class, a group of people, or a summary term — isn't certain. Overall it reads like a fragmentary tally sheet: some livestock, possibly agricultural equipment or labor, counted and grouped under official categories, with the specific totals and headings only partly preserved.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 1(N14) 1(N14), 2(N01) : PAP (supervisor/summary mark?) EN-NUN (compound sign: 'lord' + NUN-qualifier) [...] NA2(?) (damaged sign) 2(N01) : APIN (plow / plow-team) 1(N01) : UD5 (she-goat) [...] 1(N15) : KISZ (category label)
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(N14)# 1(N14)# 2(N01) , PAP~a#? |EN~a+NUN~b| [...] NA2~b1#? 2(N01) , APIN~a 1(N01) , UD5~a [...] 1(N15) , KISZ#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 31, 047. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: private: anonymous, unlocated (P235781) — 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.