Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 183
About this tablet
This is a small fragment of an administrative account tablet from the proto-cuneiform period at Jemdet Nasr (or a related southern Mesopotamian site), roughly 3100–2900 BCE — among the earliest writing in human history. The surviving lines are number notations (using the archaic N01/N14 numeral signs) paired with commodity or category markers — a field allocation, sheep, a storehouse, and a disbursement notice — but the tablet is too broken to reconstruct a coherent transaction. It likely recorded rations, land, or livestock accounted to individuals or institutions by an early bureaucratic scribe.
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 accounting record — really just a series of tallies. Someone counted quantities of something (the numbers survive but most of what they refer to is lost): an entry involving a field or land allotment, another with the number '2', a sign we can't identify, more quantities, what may be sheep, and near the end mention of a storehouse and something being 'disbursed' or handed over, with a term that might mean 'received' or 'in the hand of.' Because the tablet broke into pieces and the surface is worn, most of the descriptive words that would explain what was being counted, and for whom, are missing. What's left is a skeleton of numbers and a few institutional terms — a snapshot of bookkeeping from one of the world's first literate bureaucracies, but not a full account we can read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 3(N01), X [...] 1(N01), X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) [...] , field(GAN2) — TI(-allocation) [...] 3(N01), [...] [...] , [...] 2(N01)#, X ZATU750 1(N01), X [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N01), X sheep(UDU~a)#? [...] , [...] X 1(N14)# 8(N01)#, X [...] , X disbursed(BA#) house/storehouse(E2~a)#? SZU [...] 2(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
[...] 3(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01) , X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) [...] , GAN2 TI [...] 3(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N01)# , X ZATU750 1(N01) , X [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N01) , X UDU~a#? [...] , [...] X 1(N14)# 8(N01)# , X [...] , X BA# E2~a#? SZU [...] 2(N01) [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 183. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005250) — 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.