Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 110
About this tablet
This is a small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Jemdet Nasr (ancient southern Iraq), dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE — among the very earliest writing in human history. It is a numerical accounts tablet, listing quantities (using several distinct numeral notations) of livestock — sheep and goats — alongside references to a cattle-pen, a field, and possibly a measured length. Such tablets were the bookkeeping backbone of early temple or palace economies, tracking herds, land, and deliveries long before writing was used for anything but accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged accounting tablet. The surviving entries are mostly bare tallies of goods, recorded line by line with running counts — one line seems to note something delivered to or from a livestock pen, others record numbers of goats, sheep, and a plot of land, and one mentions a measuring rod or length. Much of the tablet is broken away, so most lines are reduced to numbers with the commodity name lost, and several lines are entirely gone. What remains reads like a fragment of a larger inventory of animals and land holdings kept by an early scribe.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N34) [...] 1(N14), 9(N01) — cattle-pen(?): delivered/brought — [illegible sign] [...] 1(N34), 3(N14) — [illegible sign] [...] [...] — [...] 2(N14), 2(N01) [...] — [...] 1(N14), 1(N01) [...] — [...] [...] — [...] 1(N34), 1(N14) [...] — [...] reed/length-unit (GI) 1(N35), 2(N15), 3(N02) — [illegible sign] [...] 9(N34), 3(N14), 3(N01) — kid/goat (MAŠ), field (GAN2), sheep (UDU) [...]
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(N34)# [...] 1(N14)# 9(N01)# , AB~b# DU# X [...] 1(N34)# 3(N14)# , X [...] [...] , [...] 2(N14)# 2(N01)# [...] , [...] 1(N14)# 1(N01)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N34) 1(N14) [...] , [...] GI 1(N35) 2(N15) 3(N02) , X [...] 9(N34)# 3(N14)# 3(N01)# , MASZ GAN2 UDU~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 110. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005177) — 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.