Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 201
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the very end of the 4th millennium BCE, from Jemdet Nasr (or a related southern Mesopotamian site) — one of the earliest experiments in writing anywhere in the world. What survives is a series of short entries, each opening with the numeral 'one,' followed by signs that are now largely illegible; the final line seems to end with signs for 'horn' and 'ox,' suggesting the tablet recorded quantities of livestock or livestock-related goods. It is impossible to reconstruct the full transaction from what remains, but it belongs to the same family of proto-cuneiform accounting tablets that track rations, animals, and goods moving through an early temple or palace household.
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 tablet, so worn and broken that only scattered pieces of its record survive. It lists a series of items, each counted as 'one' of something, but the words naming those items are mostly lost to damage. The last surviving line appears to mention 'horn' and 'ox,' hinting that the tablet was tallying livestock or animal-related goods, but the surrounding context — who owned them, why they were recorded, what happened to them — is gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N01) , GIR3~c(?) [...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) [...] , [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X SI# GU4
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
1(N01) , GIR3~c#? [...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) [...] , [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X SI# GU4
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 201. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005268) — 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.