Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 135
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the late fourth millennium BCE), found at Jemdet Nasr. It records a series of numbered entries — quantities followed by commodity or classification signs — the everyday bookkeeping of a redistributive institution such as a temple or central storehouse. Several signs (like ZATU714 and ZATU753) remain undeciphered even by specialists, and the tablet itself survives only as reassembled fragments, so the exact goods, officials, or transactions being tallied cannot be fully recovered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is an accounting tablet, now in pieces and only partly readable. It lists a string of quantities against goods or categories marked by signs that still resist full decipherment — one line tallies 2, 2, and 1 units of something under one sign combination, followed by single-unit entries under other markers, then a line of 4 units linked to a term conventionally read as 'received' or 'disbursed.' Later lines mention an unidentified sign (ZATU753), another quantity, and a final notation involving something 'new,' possibly paired with a count of 2 and a term of uncertain meaning (rendered tentatively as 'given/deposited'). Much of the tablet is broken away entirely, so the overall transaction it once documented cannot be reconstructed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 2(N05) 2(N42~a) 1(N25) units, |ZATU714xHI@g~a| [...] [...] 1(N01) unit, |DUG~cx1(N57)| [...] 1(N01) unit, [...] [...] 1(N01) unit, [...] X 4(N01) units, SZU2 [...] , ZATU753 [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N52) , , |NI~a.RU| GIBIL 2(N57) SU~a [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01) [...] ,
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
[...] 2(N05) 2(N42~a) 1(N25) , |ZATU714xHI@g~a| [...] [...] 1(N01) , |DUG~cx1(N57)| [...] 1(N01) , [...] [...] 1(N01) , [...] X 4(N01)# , SZU2# [...] , ZATU753 [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N52) , , |NI~a.RU|# GIBIL 2(N57) SU~a# [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# [...] ,
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 135. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005202) — 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.