Position in chronology
CUSAS 31, 055
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tablet from the Uruk period, one of the earliest forms of writing in human history, roughly the late 4th millennium BCE. It appears to be a record of quantities — likely salt — measured out under a category label (KIŠ), followed by numerical notations involving compound day/measure signs. The tablet is badly broken and worn, so only a skeleton of numbers and commodity signs survives, but it belongs to the vast body of proto-cuneiform accounting texts that tracked goods like grain, salt, and wool moving through early Mesopotamian institutions.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken clay tablet records an accounting entry, probably from a household or institutional storehouse. It lists a category marked KIŠ, followed by an amount of salt — 5 units — and then another entry of salt, 3 units. A number, 2 (in a large counting unit), follows before the text breaks off. After the gap, two more numeric entries appear: 5 units against one compound sign, and 4 units against another compound sign followed by an unidentified sign (ZATU669). The rest of the tablet, including whatever total or closing statement it once had, is lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) 1. ...KIŠ [...] 2. ...salt: 5(N01) [...] 3. ...salt: 3(N01) [...] 4. 2(N14) (break) 5. [...] 6. 5(N01) , |U4×3(N57)| 7. 4(N01) , |U4×1(N57)| ZATU669 (break)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
, KISZ# [...] , MUN~a1 5(N01) [...] , MUN~a1 3(N01) [...] 2(N14) [...] 5(N01) , |U4x3(N57)| 4(N01) , |U4x1(N57)| ZATU669 [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 31, 055. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (P433198) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.