Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 077
About this tablet
A heavily fragmented proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the late Uruk or Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), now held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records quantities — measured in the archaic capacity or counting system — alongside institutional designations that seem to refer to storehouses, titles of authority (EN, the early sign for 'lord'), and possibly agricultural or occupational categories such as 'plow' and 'woman'. Tablets like this are among the earliest written records in human history, predating readable Sumerian prose by centuries; they are essentially the ledger entries of the very first literate bureaucracies. The damage is severe enough that no coherent transaction can be reconstructed, but the surviving signs confirm this was an economic or administrative document tied to an institutional centre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Most of this tablet is broken away and cannot be read. What survives records a series of entries pairing quantities with institutional labels: a building or storehouse associated with a lord's establishment, a figure associated with the plow (perhaps a plowing official or land category), and small numerical tallies — one large measure beside a title, another large measure beside a lord-and-judgment entry, and a single basic unit alongside a sign group that cannot be securely identified. The last two lines are entirely lost. The overall picture is an accounting entry, but the goods, people, or transactions it tracked are too damaged to specify.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] X |GISZxSZU2~a| [...] , [...] ME~a E2~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X SAL EN~a [...] , [...] EN~a SAL TAK4~a A [...] , 3(N57) |EN2.E2~b| APIN~a 1(N42~a) , UR~a 1(N42~a)[?] , EN~a DI 1(N01) , NE~a UB ZATU798 [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X |GISZxSZU2~a| [...] , [...] ME~a E2~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X SAL EN~a [...] , [...] EN~a# SAL TAK4~a A [...] , 3(N57) |EN2.E2~b| APIN~a# 1(N42~a) , UR~a# 1(N42~a)#? , EN~a DI# 1(N01) , NE~a UB ZATU798 , [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 077. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005144) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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.