Position in chronology
CDLI Lexical 000002, ex. 184
About this tablet
A fragment of one of the very earliest administrative or lexical lists in human history, dating to the Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), probably from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records a series of institutional titles — 'chief dairy official', 'chief first-fruits official', 'chief herdsman', and others — each preceded by the numeral 1. Lists of this kind were the foundation of early Sumerian literacy: scribes memorized standardized titles and categories to manage the complex bureaucracy of the world's first cities. The tablet is now in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo and belongs to a large international corpus of copies of the same canonical list.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Each surviving line lists a single official by title: one chief dairy official, one chief first-fruits official, one chief herdsman, one lord or master, and so on. The first entry and several others are too broken to read fully. The last legible lines mention a clay- or tablet-related official before the text breaks off entirely. This is, in essence, an ancient org-chart — a canonical register of institutional roles written out for training purposes.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[1] , [...] SUKKAL 1 , chief dairy-official [1] , [...] 1 , chief first-fruits official 1 , chief herdsman [1] , [chief] lord/master 1 , chief [...] 1 , clay/wind [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[1(N01)] , [...] SUKKAL# 1(N01) , GAL~a GA~a [1(N01)] , [...] 1(N01) , GAL~a NESAG2~a 1(N01) , GAL~a TUR3~a 1(N01)# , [GAL~a] UMUN2# 1(N01) , GAL~a# [...] 1(N01) , IM~a# TUR# [N] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CDLI Lexical 000002, ex. 184. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006209) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.