Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 212
About this tablet
This is a small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period, likely from Jemdet Nasr, now broken into several joining fragments (as the photo shows — obverse, reverse, and edge pieces mounted together, with the museum accession number '1926.566' visible on one edge). It appears to record quantities — counted with archaic numeral notation — of personnel or commodities, including women (or female workers), male workers, and officials bearing titles like SANGA (temple administrator) and EN (lord/high official). Tablets like this are among the very earliest writing, used by Uruk-period institutions (temples or palace households) to track labor, rations, or goods; the terse notation of sign plus number, without grammar, is characteristic of this proto-literate accounting system.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This damaged early accounting tablet lists quantities of people or goods using simple sign-plus-number notation. One line seems to record a delivery or transfer involving a compound sign (SAGxMA) at a specified place. Following lines count units — 1 plus 7, then 1, then roughly 2 plus 7 — each associated with a term that may mean 'woman' or 'female worker,' alongside references to male workers, a storage bin, and officials titled 'temple administrator' and 'lord.' Because the tablet is broken in several places, much of the surrounding context — who exactly is being counted, and for what purpose — is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Fragmentary, proto-cuneiform administrative tablet; sign-by-sign rendering follows the transliteration) Line 1: ... DAH [broken sign] SAGxMA(compound sign) KI(place/locative marker) Line 2: 1(N14) 7(N01) — [count of measures/units] — SAL.KUR (female worker/foreign woman?) — SAGxMA (compound sign, commodity or container term) Line 3: 1(N14) — [unit] — SAL.KUR (female worker/foreign woman?) — ERIM (male workers/personnel group?) — [broken sign(s), text lost] Line 4: [2(N14)] 7(N01) — [units] — SAL.KUR (female worker/foreign woman?) — UB (storage bin/compartment?) — PA(?) (overseer/ration/classifying mark) — SAGxMA (compound sign) — SANGA (temple administrator) — [broken sign] — EN (lord/high official) — 1(N04) [numeral unit]
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
, DAH# X |SAGxMA|# KI# 1(N14) 7(N01) , |SAL.KUR~a| |SAGxMA| 1(N14) , |SAL.KUR~a| ERIM~a X [...] [2(N14)] 7(N01)# , |SAL.KUR~a|# UB PA~a#? |SAGxMA|# SANGA~a# X EN~a# 1(N04)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 212. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005279) — 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.