Position in chronology
MSVO 3, 74
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), almost certainly from the great temple city of Uruk in southern Iraq. It records quantities — probably of barley or another cereal — alongside institutional titles including what appear to be one or two sanga officials, the chief administrators or accountants of Mesopotamian temple institutions. This is the kind of record-keeping tablet that represents the very earliest phase of writing: not literature or law, but the bureaucratic counting of goods and people. Even in its broken state, it gives us a glimpse into the world's first large-scale administrative economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet tracks several quantities — the largest surviving figure being 25 units of a commodity, most likely barley — under the authority of what appear to be one or more high-ranking temple administrators (sanga officials). An earlier entry records 6 units associated with terms that may designate a 'great' official or a quality category. The middle section is too damaged to read. The bottom portion preserves a numerical total or sub-total alongside the barley sign. Portions of the tablet are broken away and the full accounting cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N14)# [...] , [...] X 6(N14) , GU NA~a GAL~a SANGA~a SANGA~a [...] , IB~a PAP~a [...] 2(N45) 5(N14) , SZE~a [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(N14)# [...] , [...] X 6(N14) , GU NA~a GAL~a SANGA~a SANGA~a [...] , IB~a PAP~a [...] 2(N45) 5(N14) , SZE~a [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 3, 74. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Land Berlin, Berlin, Germany (P005385) — 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.