Position in chronology
MSVO 3, 74
About this tablet
This is a fragmentary proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Uruk, among the very earliest writing in the world (roughly 3200–3000 BCE). It appears to record quantities of goods — possibly flax or rope, and barley — allocated to or overseen by officials called 'temple-administrators' (sanga), a title that later becomes central to Sumerian temple economy. So little of the tablet survives intact that its exact transaction cannot be reconstructed, but it belongs to the broad class of accounting texts that first gave humans a way to track goods, labor, and institutional obligations in writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken accounting tablet lists at least two quantities of goods — one entry of 6 units tied to a commodity (possibly flax or rope) and overseen by two officials titled 'temple-administrator,' and a later entry of grain (barley) totaling a large quantity. A term that might mark a supervisor or a running total appears between entries, and another sign of uncertain meaning follows. Much of the tablet is broken away, so the full transaction — who supplied what to whom, and why — cannot be recovered from what survives.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N14) [...] , [...] x 6(N14) , GU (flax/rope?) NA (unclear sign), great, temple-administrator, temple-administrator [...] , IB (unclear), PAP (supervisor/total marker) [...] 2(N45) 5(N14) , barley [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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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-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.