Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 205
About this tablet
This is a small proto-cuneiform tablet from the Uruk/Jemdet Nasr period found at Kish, one of the earliest phases of writing anywhere in the world (roughly 3200–3000 BCE). It is a bookkeeping record — a scribe pressing numeral impressions and simple pictographs into wet clay to track small livestock (goats, sheep) and goods like cloth, likely tallying disbursements or holdings assigned to storage bins. Tablets like this are not literature or law but the raw accounting substrate from which writing itself grew, recording who had how many animals or bolts of cloth in a temple or household economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet lists a short series of counted items: one entry marked with a foot- or dagger-shaped sign, followed by damage; one young goat assigned to a storage bin; another young goat linked to two uncertain signs; one piece of cloth assigned to a bin; six sheep; and one more piece of cloth, with the entry cut off by damage. In short, it's a tally sheet — a handful of small livestock and cloth items being counted and sorted into storage categories, with the beginning and end of a couple of lines lost to breakage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (unit): GIR3 (foot/dagger-sign, variant “g~b”) — ...[broken] 1 (unit): MASZ2 (kid/goat) — AN UB (storage bin, with celestial/divine marker) 1 (unit): MASZ2 (kid/goat) — SZIR(?) NIM(?) 1 (unit): TUG2(?) (cloth) — UB (storage bin) 6 (units): UDU (sheep) 1 (unit): TUG2(?) (cloth) — [...broken]
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@g~b# X [...] 1(N01) , MASZ2 AN UB 1(N01) , MASZ2 SZIR~a? NIM~b1 1(N01) , TUG2~a#? UB# 6(N01) , UDU~a 1(N01) , TUG2~a? [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 205. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005272) — 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.