Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 077
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet fragment from the Uruk/Jemdet Nasr period, one of humanity's earliest writing systems, used for tracking goods, personnel, or land in an early Mesopotamian institution — likely a temple or palace household. The surviving signs suggest a list mixing numerals with references to women or female workers, an official or 'lord' figure, a storehouse, a plow, and possibly a fuel or storage bin, but so much of the tablet is missing that its exact transaction cannot be reconstructed. Fragments like this one, found at Jemdet Nasr in southern Iraq, are precious precisely because they are among the very first attempts to record economic life in writing, even when — as here — most of the story is lost to breakage.
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 old accounting tablet, so damaged that only a handful of entries survive. It seems to list quantities of things alongside notations for a 'woman' or female worker and an official called a 'lord,' plus references to a storehouse, a plow, and possibly a fuel bin or storage compartment. Numbers using the archaic Uruk-period counting marks appear next to several of these entries, but the commodities or people being counted, and the overall purpose of the record, cannot be recovered — the beginning of every line and much of the tablet's surface is broken away, and the record breaks off entirely before the end.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Case] , [...] ... |GIŠ×ŠU2~a| (compound sign, illegible commodity) [Case] , [...] ME~a — E2~a ("house/storehouse") [Case] , [...] (broken, illegible) [Case] , [...] ... SAL ("woman/female") EN~a ("lord/official") [Case] , [...] EN~a# ("lord/official", damaged) SAL ("woman") TAK4~a A ("remainder"(?) + "water") [Case] , 3(N57) |EN2.E2~b| (compound sign) APIN~a# ("plow", damaged) 1(N42~a) , UR~a# ("dog"(?) sign, damaged) 1(N42~a)#? , EN~a ("lord/official") DI# (damaged, function unclear) 1(N01) , NE~a ("fire/fuel") UB ("bin/compartment") ZATU798 (unidentified sign) , [...] (broken, illegible) , [...] (broken, illegible)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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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-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.