Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 233
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken administrative tablet from Jemdet Nasr, one of the very earliest cities to use writing, dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE. What survives are fragments of an account listing numbers of sheep and calves alongside institutional terms like 'cattle-stall' and 'assembly,' and a mention of the city of Uruk — the kind of bookkeeping a temple or palace scribe kept to track livestock and rations. The tablet is so fragmentary that its full purpose cannot be reconstructed, but it belongs to the same genre as thousands of other proto-cuneiform economic records from this period.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is an accounting fragment, and most of it is missing. Where the text survives, it lists a quantity — '2' — associated with what seems to be a cattle-stall or livestock institution and an assembly or gathering. Nearby lines mention sheep and a calf, and another line refers to the city of Uruk and possibly a field. A later line repeats the '2' and the cattle-stall/assembly phrase along with two signs that may mean something like 'in the year' and 'by hand of.' The last lines are too damaged to read clearly, though one may note something was 'given' or 'deposited,' and the very end may record that goods were 'consumed' or issued as rations. Because so much of the tablet is broken away, the overall transaction it recorded cannot be reconstructed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 2(N01), cattle-stall(?) — assembly [...], sheep — calf [...], [...] ... Uruk — field(?) ... [...], ... [...] 2(N01), cattle-stall(?) — assembly — MU(?), hand(?) [...], [...] head(?) — NI.RU (given/deposited?) , [...] — consumed(?)
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
[...] 2(N01)# , AB~a UKKIN~a [...] , UDU~a AMAR [...] , [...] X UNUG~a GAN2# X [...] , X [...] 2(N01) , AB~a UKKIN~a MU# SZU# [...] , [...] SAG#? |NI~a.RU|# , [...] GU7#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 233. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005300) — 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.