Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 186
About this tablet
A small, damaged proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from the late Uruk or Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), now held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records quantities of goods or commodities — expressed in the archaic numerical notation of the period — assigned to or overseen by a high-status official (EN) alongside an unidentified sign category (ZATU776). The tablet is too fragmentary to reconstruct a complete transaction, but its structure — numerical notations paired with commodity and official signs — is typical of the earliest institutional bookkeeping from southern Mesopotamia. It represents the very beginnings of writing, used here not for literature or law but for the mundane tracking of goods in a large household or temple economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too broken to read in full, but what survives records a series of quantity entries. One line lists 1(N14) and 10(N01) — substantial amounts — associated with an official title (EN), a supervisory or classificatory sign (PA), and an unidentified commodity sign (ZATU776), with further numerical notations following. Another line appears to include a time or date marker (U4) alongside a sign possibly meaning 'given' or 'deposited'. A final legible entry tallies 4(N14) and 7(N01) against a commodity category that may relate to a land enclosure or bundled goods. The rest is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] X DU AB~a [...]\n1(N14) 10(N01) , EN~a PA~a ZATU776 1(N58)? AN 3(N57) [...]\n, U4 |NI~a.RU| [...]\n[...] , [...]\n1(N14) 1(N01) [...] , [...]\n1(N14) [...] , [...]\n4(N14) 7(N01) , LAGAB~b DUR~b X [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , X DU AB~a# [...] 1(N14) 10(N01) , EN~a# PA~a# ZATU776 1(N58)? AN 3(N57) [...] , U4 |NI~a.RU|# [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) [...] , [...] 1(N14)# [...] , [...] 4(N14)# 7(N01) , LAGAB~b#? DUR~b X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 186. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005253) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.