Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 142
About this tablet
This is a small, badly worn proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), one of the earliest phases of writing. Its surviving traces are a sequence of numeral notations paired with commodity signs — sheep in one line, barley and beer in the last legible line — typical of the terse tallying records kept by early Mesopotamian institutions to track goods, livestock, and rations. Almost all of the entries that would identify the recipients, officials, or purpose of the accounting are broken away, leaving only isolated numbers and a few readable signs.
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 ancient inventory list. Most of the tablet is broken, so the entries at the top are illegible except for scattered damaged signs. Further down, a line records a quantity of one unit tied to sheep, though what follows is lost. Two more lines each record a quantity of one unit next to signs too damaged to read. The final surviving line lists a larger quantity — one plus two of a sub-unit — of barley and beer, followed by more illegible text. In short: a numbered tally of livestock and foodstuffs, but too broken to say what transaction it recorded or for whom.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Column/line 1) [...] — [...] (2) [...] — [...] X (3) [...] — [...] X (4) [...] — [...] (5) [...] — [...] X (6) [...] — [...] X (7) 1(N01) — sheep [...] (8) 1(N01) — [unidentified sign] [...] (9) 1(N01) — [two unidentified signs] (10) [...] — [two unidentified signs] (11) [...] 1(N01) 2(N39~a) — barley, beer, [unidentified sign] [...]
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X 1(N01)# , UDU~a# [...] 1(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01)# , X X [...] , X X [...] 1(N01) 2(N39~a) , SZE~a# KASZ~a# X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 142. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005209) — 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.