Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 118
About this tablet
This is a small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Jemdet Nasr (ancient Iraq), dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE — one of the very earliest phases of writing anywhere in the world. It uses simple numerical notation alongside sign-groups for occupations and goods (a potter, a class of male laborers, a woman, silver, water), suggesting it once recorded quantities of people, commodities, or rations allocated by some institution. The tablet is now broken into several pieces, and most of its content is lost, but it survives as a fragment of the bookkeeping that underpinned one of humanity's first bureaucracies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken clay record lists small counted quantities against a series of categories. The first line ties three units to a potter; the second ties three units to a group of male laborers, though what follows is lost. The third line groups three units with several terms — apparently a woman, silver, a day or time period, water, and something like an exalted person or storehouse — but exactly what is being counted or why these terms are combined can't be recovered. Three more short entries follow (two units, then one unit twice), each trailing off into unreadable breaks. Altogether it reads like a fragment of an inventory or ration list from an early bureaucratic institution, but the specific transaction it recorded is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 3(N01) , [......] potter (BAHAR2~b) 2. 3(N01) , laborer/worker-class (GURUSZDA) [......] 3. 3(N01) , woman(?) (SAL), silver (KU3), day/time-unit(?) (U4), water (A), exalted one/storehouse(?) (NUN~a) 4. 2(N01) [......] , [......] 5. 1(N01) [......] , [......] 6. 1(N01)# [......] , [......]
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
3(N01)# , [...] BAHAR2~b 3(N01)# , GURUSZDA# [...] 3(N01)# , SAL KU3~a U4# A NUN~a 2(N01)# [...] , [...] 1(N01) [...] , [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 118. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005185) — 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.