Position in chronology
MS 3197a
About this tablet
This is a small proto-cuneiform tablet from the Uruk period, among the earliest writing in the world, roughly 3300–3000 BCE. It is not a sentence or story but a bare administrative tally: a series of numeral notations (impressed circles and semicircles of two different sizes) followed by short strings of pictographic signs — a woman/worker marker, a repeated category sign called KISZ, a highland/foreign-land sign, a festival sign, and a few other terms whose exact meaning is now lost to us. It likely records quantities of commodities, workers, or ration allotments organized under recurring institutional or personnel categories, possibly connected to a festival (EZEM) — the everyday bookkeeping of an early Mesopotamian household or temple economy, written before writing could yet record full sentences.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is an ancient accounting slip. Each line pairs a number, recorded with special counting marks, against a short set of symbols standing for a category of goods or people — one line seems to concern women or female workers grouped under a recurring administrative heading called 'KISZ'; another concerns something linked to a foreign or highland place, also under that same KISZ heading; a third ties a quantity to what looks like a festival. One line lists only a single unidentified sign with no clear number attached. The final line records a larger quantity against a cluster of signs that may involve a 'remainder' or leftover allocation, along with what might be container or vessel terms — but the exact goods being tallied, and what these categories meant to the scribe, cannot be recovered with certainty.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N14) 4(N01) — [entry:] SAL, KISZ 1(N14) 3(N01)# — [entry:] KUR~a, KISZ# 2(N14) 1(N01) — [entry:] |EZEM~axX|, KISZ — [entry:] ZATU758 4(N14) 8(N01)# — [entry:] [KISZ], X, TAK4~a, SZITA@g~a, MAR~a
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
1(N14) 4(N01) , SAL KISZ 1(N14) 3(N01)# , KUR~a KISZ# 2(N14) 1(N01) , |EZEM~axX| KISZ , ZATU758 4(N14) 8(N01)# , [KISZ] X TAK4~a SZITA@g~a MAR~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC) ?) — MS 3197a. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252188) — 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.