Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 163
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the late 4th millennium BCE), found at Jemdet Nasr in southern Iraq and now in the Ashmolean Museum. It belongs to the very earliest phase of writing — proto-cuneiform — and records a short list of counted goods (a container or two, some quantity of fruit, a few unidentified sign-categories) with a final reference to the city of Uruk. Texts like this are the bureaucratic bedrock of early Mesopotamian city-states: officials tracking small allotments of goods, using a script whose full grammar and vocabulary are still being reconstructed by scholars today.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a short tally: one vessel or container, four units of apple or orchard-fruit, two more units of something whose sign is broken and unreadable, one unit of a storehouse-type container, one unit of another uncertain category, an entry that may mean 'given' or 'deposited,' three units of an unidentified administrative category, and finally a reference to the city of Uruk — likely marking where the goods were recorded or delivered. It reads like a small accounting note logging a handful of commodities and containers, but because the script is among the earliest ever used, several of its terms cannot be pinned down with certainty.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N01) unit(s), MA (vessel/container) 4(N01) unit(s), HASZHUR (apple/orchard-fruit) 2(N01) unit(s) [...], [MA] ZATU735~b (sign/commodity, uncertain) 1(N01) unit, GA2~a1×GESZTU~c5 (compound sign — storehouse/container-type) 1(N01) unit, UKKIN~b×DIN (compound sign, referent unclear) NI~a.RU ("given/deposited" — tentative) 3(N57), MUSZ3~a (administrative referent unclear) UNUG~a (Uruk)
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
1(N01) , MA 4(N01) , HASZHUR# 2(N01)# [...] , [MA] ZATU735~b# 1(N01) , |GA2~a1xGESZTU~c5|# 1(N01) , |UKKIN~bxDIN| , |NI~a.RU| , 3(N57) MUSZ3~a , UNUG~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 163. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005230) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.