Position in chronology
CUSAS 31, 055
About this tablet
This is a small, badly worn proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from the late Uruk period in southern Mesopotamia, around 3300–3000 BCE, from the first generations of writing. Nobody is named on it. It records a commodity, probably salt, in counted units. The reverse pairs quantities with signs that likely count days, so it may track how long an allotment lasted or how often it was delivered. The exact transaction can't be recovered, but the tablet shows early administrators already tying amounts of goods to periods of time.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The first line is a heading or category (KISZ), and the rest of it is broken off. Below it are two entries for what is probably salt: 5 units and then 3 units, with the rest of each line lost. A figure of 20 follows, and then another line is missing. On the back, 5 units go with a period of 3 days, and 4 units go with a single day. That second entry also carries a sign whose meaning is unknown. The last line on the back is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. KISZ [...] 2. salt(?): 5 units [...] 3. salt(?): 3 units [...] 4. 20 (2 × N14) 5. [...] Reverse 1. 5 units: 3 days (U4 × 3) 2. 4 units: 1 day (U4 × 1), ZATU669 3. [...]
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
, 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-opus-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.