Position in chronology
MSVO 3, 69
About this tablet
This is a fragmentary proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Late Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), almost certainly from the great city of Uruk in southern Iraq, the earliest urban centre in human history. It records quantities of goods — cattle, possibly vessels, and other commodities — against category labels and numerical notations, the kind of institutional bookkeeping that supported the management of a large temple or palace complex. The signs are among the earliest writing ever made: not yet a full language but a system of pictograms and numerals used to track economic flows. The tablet is too damaged to reconstruct a complete transaction, but it is a direct witness to the invention of writing itself.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The readable entries show: five cattle; four items in some administrative category; some quantity of vessels or jars; an entry involving 'ZAG' (perhaps a quality or destination marker); five large-unit quantities of something now lost; and a final summary or closing line mentioning 'SI,' a 'great' qualifier, and a combined numerical sign — likely a grand total or institutional heading. Much of the tablet is broken away and the rest cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 5, cattle (GU4) [...] 4, [category: KISZ] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] vessel/jar (DUG~a[?]) [...] , [...] ZAG~a [...] 5 (large unit N14), [...] [...] , [...] [...] SI AN[?] large (GAL~a) |1(N58).BAD~a|
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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-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.