Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 106
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken administrative tablet from the Uruk/Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3200–2900 BCE), among the very earliest writing in human history. It appears to be a receipt or account tracking small quantities of barley and fodder alongside a livestock or personnel notation, using numeral signs and proto-cuneiform commodity marks rather than connected sentences. Because so little of the tablet survives, only fragments of individual entries remain — the full transaction, the parties involved, and the totals are lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives are the scraps of an old inventory or receipt: one unit of some kind of fodder or plant material is recorded, then a break; four units of something followed by an unidentified sign mark another entry, also broken off. Later lines record quantities of barley alongside a classifying mark, a small-stock or 'foot' notation, and a compound sign combining 'young animal' with a numeral — likely tallying livestock or their feed. A final surviving line again lists barley together with a reed-measure sign and an institutional marker, probably naming the storehouse or authority the grain was counted against. The rest of the tablet, including whatever totals or names it once bore, is broken away and lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N01) — U2 (fodder/plant material) [...] 4(N01) [...] — ZATU644 (sign, commodity undetermined) [...] — barley (ŠE), PA (mark/classifier), GIR₃@g (gir, small-stock or foot-sign), |AMAR.1(N02)| (compound notation, 'young animal' + numeral sign) [...] [...] — barley (ŠE), GI (reed/length-measure), AB (institutional designation) [...]
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) , U2~b [...] 4(N01)# [...] , ZATU644~a# [...] , SZE~a# PA~a GIR3@g~b |AMAR.1(N02)| [...] [...] , SZE~a# GI AB~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 106. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005173) — 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.