Position in chronology
MRAH O.4995
About this tablet
This is a proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from the late Uruk period, around 3200–3000 BCE. It may come from the area of Umma in southern Iraq. On the reverse a scribe listed five groups of items, each counted and labelled with a category or grade, and added them up to a total of 74. Which category word, AL, is being counted is not clear. The grade signs, 'small/young' and a 'day' sign marked with one, two or three strokes, look like age classes or sub-categories. The closing line gives the total and names the office or personnel responsible. The tablet shows that the earliest writing was, above all, bookkeeping.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The account lists 36 items under the heading AL, then 8 small or young ones of the EN class, then 7, 1 and 22 small ones graded by the 'day' sign with one, two and three marks. That makes 74 in all. The final line records the total and adds a string of signs that probably names the responsible offices or officials, one of them perhaps connected with salt. The dense front of the tablet is well preserved but was not included in the transliteration, so it is not rendered here.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineReverse (the only part transliterated): 1. 36: AL 2. 8: EN~a, small/young (TUR) 3. 7: U4 with 1 mark, small/young (TUR) 4. 1: U4 with 2 marks, small/young (TUR) 5. 22: U4 with 3 marks, small/young (TUR) 6. (Total) 74: 1(N57) 2(N57); MUN~a1, SU~a, PAP~a, NIM~b2, DARA3~c×KAR2, AL(?) [The heavily inscribed obverse and edges visible in the photograph are not transliterated and are left untranslated here.]
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
3(N14) 6(N01) , AL# 8(N01) , EN~a TUR 7(N01) , |U4x1(N57)| TUR 1(N01) , |U4x2(N57)| TUR 2(N14) 2(N01) , |U4x3(N57)| TUR 1(N34) 1(N14) 4(N01) , 1(N57) 2(N57) MUN~a1 SU~a PAP~a NIM~b2 |DARA3~cxKAR2| AL#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MRAH O.4995. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels, Belgium (P005573) — 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.