Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 068
About this tablet
This is a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk/Jemdet Nasr period, among the very earliest writing in human history (roughly 3200–2900 BCE), found at the site of Jemdet Nasr in southern Iraq. It is not a narrative text but an accounting ledger: a scribe recorded a numbered list of commodities, animals, personnel categories, and institutional units — barley, birds, workers, courtyards or enclosures — each tagged with a quantity of "1" and a short pictographic label. Such tablets tracked the resources and labor of a temple or palace household at the dawn of literacy, before writing could express full grammatical sentences.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is an early bookkeeping list, not a story or letter. Line by line, a scribe jotted down a series of single-unit entries — one of this sign, one of that — covering things like grain deliveries, a courtyard or enclosure, a lord or overseer, some birds, and groups of workers, each paired with a numeral or a small sub-count. Toward the bottom the tablet is broken, but a larger entry survives recording a quantity of fourteen against an institutional "cattle-stall" or storage category with a disbursement mark, followed by another broken passage mentioning delivery or transit. In short: an inventory or ration list from a temple or palace office, tracking small quantities of goods, animals, and labor — the kind of everyday accounting record that writing itself was invented to keep.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (unit): ŠU&ŠU (a compound "hands" sign; function/commodity unclear) 1 (unit): BU-grain (bu~b), barley — given/deposited (ru) 1 (unit): SI (horn) — enclosure/courtyard (kisal) 1 (unit): EN (lord/high official) — PAP (supervisory or summary notation) 1 (unit): 3(N57) [numeric sub-entry, capacity-system count] 1 (unit): AN — 3(N57) 1 (unit): GU — 3(N57) 1 (unit): SI, TUN3 (vessel?), SI — enclosure/courtyard (kisal) 1 (unit): bird (MUŠEN) — NA, reed-measure (GI) — workers (ERIM) 1 (unit): [sign, broken/uncertain] — workers (ERIM) (break) — UB, AB (institutional/cattle-stall category) [...] 14 (unit: 10+4): UB, AB (institutional category), BAR (disbursement/portion marker) (break) — [...] SUG5, DU (deliver/go/personnel marker)
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(N01)# , |SZU&SZU| 1(N01) , BU~b SZE3 RU 1(N01) , SI KISAL~b1 1(N01) , EN~a PAP~a 1(N01) , 3(N57) 1(N01) , AN 3(N57) 1(N01) , GU 3(N57) 1(N01) , SI TUN3~a SI KISAL~b1 1(N01) , MUSZEN NA~a GI ERIM~a 1(N01) , X ERIM~a# , UB AB~a# [...] 1(N14)# 4(N01)# , UB AB~a BAR , [...] SUG5# DU@g?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 068. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA (P005135) — 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.