Position in chronology
CUSAS 31, 168
About this tablet
A small, damaged proto-cuneiform account from the Uruk period, about 3200–3000 BCE. It may come from the Umma region of southern Iraq, but that origin is not certain. Its entries count vessels and fish. They include 15 SUHUR fish, probably a kind of carp, plus some signs that may be official titles or personnel categories. It belongs to the earliest stage of writing, when scribes used writing mainly to keep track of goods for large institutions. The tablet has no findspot and is held in an unknown private collection, so its original context is lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The first two entries record amounts, now lost, of two types of vessel: the ordinary SILA3 jar and a variant marked with the MUD sign. The next entry is intact and lists 15 SUHUR fish. After that comes a group of signs that seem to name officials or categories: UMUN2, a "great" one, a "small" one, and a PA. The number that went with them is broken off. Another broken entry lists MUD and IB. The last line starts with the signs SAL PAP, perhaps a person or an office, and the rest is lost. Nothing on the back of the tablet can be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 1. [...] a SILA3-vessel 2. [...] a SILA3+MUD-vessel 3. 15 (1 ten + 5 ones) SUHUR fish 4. [...] UMUN2, GAL ("great"), TUR ("small"), PA 5. [...] MUD, IB 6. SAL PAP [...] (Reverse: no legible signs survive; the surface is worn and cracked)
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
[...] SILA3~a#? [...] |SILA3~a+MUD3~b| 1(N14) 5(N01) , SUHUR [...] UMUN2 GAL~a TUR PA~a [...] MUD IB~a , SAL PAP~a [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 31, 168. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: private: anonymous, unlocated (P270811) — 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.