Position in chronology
MSVO 3, 69
About this tablet
This is a small, badly worn proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Uruk-period Mesopotamia (roughly the late 4th millennium BCE), one of the very earliest forms of writing in the world. It appears to be a tally of commodities or livestock — cattle (GU4), a category or group termed KISZ, possibly a jar (DUG), and other counted goods — recorded with archaic numeral notations rather than connected sentences. Tablets like this were the bookkeeping backbone of early urban temple or palace economies, tracking who received or delivered how much of what, long before writing was used for literature or law.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This fragment is an ancient inventory list, not a story or letter. One line records 5 units connected with cattle (oxen); another records 4 units under a category called kisz. Further down the tablet lists what may be a jar and something described by the term 'zag' (an edge or boundary), followed by a count of 5 measures of something now lost. The tablet breaks off before the entries can be fully understood, but the final surviving line seems to close with a term for 'horn' or a related object, a possible sky or institutional marker (AN), and the qualifier 'great/large,' alongside a numeral notation. In short: a scribe's running count of goods — cattle, containers, and other commodities — most of which is now illegible because the tablet is broken and worn.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 5(N01) units, GU4 (ox/cattle) [...] 4(N01) units, KISZ (category label) [...] , [...] [...] , [...] DUG (jar?) [...] , [...] ZAG (side/boundary?) [...] 5(N14) units, [...] [...] , [...] , [...] SI (horn?) AN(?) GAL (great/large) |1(N58).BAD|
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
[...] 5(N01)# , GU4 [...] 4(N01)# , KISZ [...] , [...] [...] , [...] DUG~a#? [...] , [...] ZAG~a# [...] 5(N14)# , [...] [...] , [...] , [...] SI# AN#? GAL~a# |1(N58).BAD~a|#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 3, 69. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Land Berlin, Berlin, Germany (P005380) — 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.