Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 017
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), catalogued at Cornell University. It records quantities of commodities or personnel categories — including what may be a sweetener (honey or syrup), a female worker, a high-status official or institutional head, and a dependent worker or servant — alongside numerical entries. Like thousands of similar tablets from early Mesopotamia, this is essentially an accounting record: the world's earliest writing used almost exclusively to keep track of goods and people. The tablet is fragmentary and heavily worn, making a full interpretation impossible, but its surviving entries give a glimpse into the meticulous bookkeeping of the earliest urban institutions.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too broken at the start to read fully. What survives records a series of small quantities: 2 units of something under PAP and DAR categories; 2 units of NAGA (possibly natron or a plant); an entry for a female worker; 2 units assigned to an official or institutional head (EN), with a larger unit (1 N04); 1 unit associated with NU11 and AN; then further broken lines; 4 units of honey or syrup (LAL); and 1 unit of a dependent worker or dog (UR). The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 2(N01) PAP~a DAR~b 2(N01) NAGA~a [...] [...] SAL [...] [...] 2(N01) EN~a 1(N04) 1(N01) NU11 AN [...] [...] [...] [...] 4(N01) LAL2~a 1(N01) UR~a
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] 2(N01)# , PAP~a DAR~b 2(N01)# , NAGA~a [...] [...] , SAL [...] , [...] 2(N01) , EN~a 1(N04) 1(N01) , NU11 AN [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 4(N01) , LAL2~a 1(N01) , UR~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 017. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA (P330069) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.