Position in chronology
MS 3153
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), one of the earliest forms of writing in human history — a stage before true sentences, when scribes recorded quantities of goods or people using impressed numerals alongside a handful of pictographic sign-groups. The tablet is divided into cases (five in total, two on the obverse and three on the reverse), each pairing a numeral notation with a short label such as KISZ, SAL ('woman'/female personnel), EN ('lord' or high official), or ERIM ('workers'). It likely comes from an institutional household — a temple or palace economy — tallying commodities, rations, or labor gangs under different categories or overseers, but because the sign values themselves (KISZ, KUR, EN, ERIM, SAL) are still debated for this earliest phase of writing, its precise subject cannot be pinned down with certainty.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a bookkeeping tally, not a story or letter. Five separate entries record counts of something — probably goods, rations, or people — each counted with the number-signs of the accounting system and sorted into named groups. One entry is tagged 'KUR-KISZ,' another 'KISZ, women,' a third under a 'lord' or high official, a fourth under 'male workers,' and a last one simply 'KISZ' again. In short: a running list, case by case, of quantities assigned to or drawn from different categories of people or supplies in an early institutional household — the kind of internal accounting record kept by a large estate or temple, though the exact commodities being counted are lost to us today.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: Case 1: 2(N34) 5(N14) [numerical notation] — KUR~a KISZ Case 2: 3(N34) 2(N14) 3(N01) [numerical notation] — KISZ SAL Reverse: Case 3: 5(N34) 2(N14) 1(N01) [numerical notation] — EN~a Case 4: 5(N14) 2(N01) [numerical notation] — ERIM~a Case 5: 6(N34) 1(N14) 3(N01) [numerical notation] — KISZ
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
2(N34) 5(N14) , KUR~a KISZ 3(N34) 2(N14) 3(N01) , KISZ SAL 5(N34) 2(N14) 1(N01) , EN~a 5(N14) 2(N01) , ERIM~a 6(N34) 1(N14) 3(N01) , KISZ
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC) ?) — MS 3153. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252164) — 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.