Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 230
About this tablet
This is a small clay account tablet from the proto-cuneiform period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), likely from Jemdet Nasr in southern Iraq. It appears to be an administrative list — a column of entries, each pairing a quantity of '1' with an institutional title or commodity sign (a storehouse, a temple administrator, a vizier, and other officials or goods), ending with a larger tally of 43 units. Such tablets recorded the allocation or accounting of persons, offices, animals, or goods attached to an early temple or palace household; the reverse of this particular tablet appears to be uninscribed. Its fragmentary state is typical of this earliest layer of writing, when scribes were still developing a system of signs to track institutional wealth and personnel.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged accounting tablet. Most lines are broken at the start, but where legible, each entry lists the number '1' next to a word for a building or storehouse, a title, or a commodity: a storehouse is mentioned twice, followed by entries for a person or role called TAK4, a 'head' or chief figure, someone associated with a 'GIR' sign, a storehouse item connected with a 'lion' emblem, and then three institutional titles in a row — a temple administrator, a vizier or minister, and a third title that's hard to pin down. After that comes an entry involving oil or fat and what might be a hoe or agricultural term, then an unreadable sign, and finally a summary line totaling 43 units, whose subject is lost to a break. The overall impression is a short list of people, offices, or goods being tallied '1' at a time, capped by a grand total — but too much of the tablet is broken away to reconstruct the full transaction.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [...] — [...] X (broken, sign not identifiable) 2. [...] — [...] storehouse (E2~a) 3. [...] — [...] head/chief (SAG), BAR, X 4. 1(N01) — X [...] 5. [...] — storehouse (E2~a), X [...] 6. 1(N01) — TAK4~a, head/chief (SAG) 7. 1(N01) — GIR3@g~b(?) 8. [...] — [...] (break) 9. 1(N01) — X, storehouse (E2~a), PIRIG~b1 ("lion") 10. 1(N01) — SANGA~a (temple administrator) 11. 1(N01) — SUKKAL (vizier/minister) 12. 1(N01) — EN2(?) 13. 1(N01) — NI~a (oil/fat?), AL [...] 14. — [...] ZATU752 15. 4(N14) 3(N01) [= 43] — [...] (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
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] E2~a# [...] , [...] SAG BAR X 1(N01) , X [...] [...] , E2~a X [...] 1(N01) , TAK4~a SAG 1(N01) , GIR3@g~b#? [...] , [...] 1(N01) , X E2~a# PIRIG~b1 1(N01) , SANGA~a 1(N01) , SUKKAL 1(N01) , EN2#? 1(N01) , NI~a AL [...] , [...] ZATU752 1(N14)# 3(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 230. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005297) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.