Position in chronology
MSVO 3, 08
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the proto-literate city of Uruk (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), inscribed with one of the earliest writing systems humans ever developed. It is a numerical/commodity account — a scribe recording quantities of goods (a jar, a reddish substance, an unidentified item called MUD, possibly workers or produce) against a series of numeral notations. The individual commodity signs are still only partly deciphered by modern scholars, which is typical for this earliest stratum of cuneiform administration; the tablet is a fragment of the accounting apparatus that underpinned one of the world's first cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary bookkeeping tablet. The top of the record is broken away. What survives lists a series of entries, each pairing a quantity with a good or category: two units of something called DUG (perhaps a jar or jar-measure); four and a fraction units of a reddish commodity together with an item called NAMESZDA and a plot- or garden-related term; then two bare quantity entries with no commodity name recorded (or now lost); an entry involving what may be a female worker or a qualifying term; and finally a couple of units of an unidentified commodity called MUD linked to a term that might mean storehouse or a quality grade, before the text breaks off again. In short, it's an itemized tally of goods or labor whose exact subject can no longer be pinned down with certainty.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], [...] 2(N14), DUG~a(?) ["jar" — commodity sign, reading uncertain] 4(N03) 1(N40), SI4~f NAMESZDA SAR~a(?) [reddish(?) commodity — NAMESZDA — garden/plot(?) designation] 3(N03), 1(N03) 1(N40), 2(N03), SAL ḪI KA~a [woman/female-worker(?) sign — qualifier — "mouth" sign] 2(N03) 1(N40), MUD NUN~a(?) [...] [unidentified commodity — storehouse/quality designation(?), 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
[...] , [...] 2(N14) , DUG~a#? 4(N03) 1(N40) , SI4~f# NAMESZDA# SAR~a#? 3(N03) , 1(N03) 1(N40) , 2(N03) , SAL HI KA~a 2(N03) 1(N40) , MUD NUN~a#? [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 3, 08. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P005319) — 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.