Position in chronology
MS 3164
About this tablet
This is a small, badly worn clay tablet from the Uruk period — one of the very first phases of writing, when scribes recorded quantities using impressed numeral notches alongside pictographic commodity and personnel signs rather than syllabic words. It appears to be an administrative account, tallying units (marked '1' in two different counting notations) against goods or categories such as a container/boat sign, a workforce designation, and repeated references to a high-status official or institutional head ('EN'). Because most of the entries are broken away and the surviving signs are archaic and multivalent, we cannot say what commodity or transaction this record actually tracked — only that it belongs to the earliest bureaucratic accounting tradition of ancient Mesopotamia, roughly 3300–3000 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an ancient tally sheet. Several lines at the start are completely lost — we can tell only that a quantity was recorded, but not of what. Then come four lines each marked with a single unit, the last of which is followed by a sign that may mean 'boat' or 'container.' The next two lines, also mostly destroyed, seem to reference an official or head of some kind. The final surviving line records one unit of another kind, followed by a string of signs that likely names a category of goods or workers under the authority of that same official — though the very last sign is too damaged to read at all. In short: a scrap of an inventory or ration list from the dawn of writing, most of its content lost to time.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1 (N01 unit) , [...] 1 (N01 unit) , [...] 1 (N01 unit) , [...] 1 (N01 unit) , MAR~a (container/boat[?]) [...] , EN~a (lord/official) [...] [...] , [...] 1 (N14 unit) , KISZ — |BU~a+DU6~a| (compound sign) — ERIN (workforce/troops) — EN~a (lord/official) — X (illegible sign)
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
[N] , [...] [N] , [...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) , MAR~a# [N] , EN~a [...] [N] , [...] 1(N14) , KISZ |BU~a+DU6~a| ERIN EN~a X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC) ?) — MS 3164. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252175) — 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.