Position in chronology
MSVO 3, 19
About this tablet
This is a small clay accounting tablet from the very dawn of writing — the proto-cuneiform tradition of Uruk-period Mesopotamia, roughly 3300–3100 BCE, now held in Berlin. It belongs to the archive published as MSVO 3, a corpus of early administrative tablets recording the movement of goods (birds, barley, pottery) and the people responsible for them, including someone bearing the title 'vizier' (sukkal) and a supervisor associated with pottery-making. Writing at this stage combined numeral notations with pictographic commodity signs rather than full sentences, so what survives reads like a tally sheet rather than connected prose — an early bureaucrat's ledger, not a story.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a fragmentary inventory or ration list. The surviving entries record quantities of goods — small birds (possibly plucked or of a particular kind), what may be barley, and other commodities — each counted out against named individuals or offices, including a person called Šubur and officials titled 'vizier' and something like a 'potter supervisor.' One entry notes goods 'consumed' or issued as rations. Much of the tablet, including the beginning of several lines and most of the reverse, is too broken or worn to read, so the overall transaction it recorded cannot be reconstructed in full.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) Line 1: [...] 2(N14) [...] : [...] Line 2: [...] 2(N01) 2(N39~a) : USZ, (the man) 1(N57)-Šubur Line 3: 5(N14) : nam-šita(?), small, bird(s), BU, small Line 4: [...] 3(N14) [...] : [...] Line 5: 4(N14) 2(N01) [...] : LAM, [x — broken] Line 6: 1(N14) : hal, ME, vizier (sukkal) Line 7: 1(N14) : PAP, potter (bahar2) Line 8: [...] : consumed / rationed (gu7) (Reverse continues, badly worn — no further signs preserved beyond the last case) Line 9: 3(N34) 1(N01) 1(N39~a) : barley (še) [...]
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)# [...] , [...] [...] 2(N01)# 2(N39~a) , USZ~a |1(N57).SZUBUR| 5(N14)# , NAMESZDA TUR MUSZEN BU~a# TUR# [...] 3(N14)# [...] , [...] 4(N14)# 2(N01)# [...] , LAM~b# X 1(N14) , HAL ME~a SUKKAL 1(N14) , PAP~a BAHAR2~b , [...] GU7 3(N34)# 1(N01) 1(N39~a) , SZE~a [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 3, 19. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Land Berlin, Berlin, Germany (P005330) — 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.