Position in chronology
MSVO 3, 35
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably from the city of Uruk in southern Iraq, now held in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo. It records quantities of what appear to be sheep or small livestock distributed from or associated with an institutional storehouse, under the authority of a high-status official (EN~a). The tablet is heavily worn and only partially legible, but it belongs to the earliest stratum of human writing — a period when scribes were inventing the conventions of record-keeping itself. Even in its damaged state, it preserves the characteristic format of Uruk-period economic documents: numerical notations in the N01/N24/N39 system paired with commodity and title signs.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records several small allocations: 2 units associated with the AN and MUSZ3~a categories, 1 unit for the NUN+EN official or institution, 4 large units plus 1 smaller unit under the NAM2 KAB heading, and 1 unit of the GAL ('large/great') grade. A summary or closing line mentions mixed livestock — sheep — connected to a storehouse (E2~a), possibly with a date reference. The final line records 1 further unit, but the commodity signs are too damaged to read. The rest is largely lost or illegible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 [units], AN, MUSZ3~a 1 [unit], |NUN~a+EN~a| 4(N39~a) 1(N24) [units], NAM2 KAB 1 [unit], GAL~a [...] HI mixed, [date?] UDU~a [from/in] E2~a GU 1 [unit], [X] [X]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(N01)# , AN MUSZ3~a 1(N01)# , |NUN~a+EN~a|# 4(N39~a) 1(N24) , NAM2 KAB 1(N01) , GAL~a , HI@g~a SZA |U4.3(N08)|? UDU~a E2~a GU 1(N01) , X X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 3, 35. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P005346) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.