Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 026
About this tablet
A proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE, predating connected Sumerian writing — the signs are institutional logograms pairing numerical counts with commodity or place categories rather than forming readable sentences. The surviving entries point to a large estate, probably temple-administered, tracking resources across a courtyard, a storage container, a livestock pen, and dairy produce, with a final entry apparently assigning units to a land category. Several rows are broken at the top and their quantities are lost entirely. This tablet belongs to the very earliest layer of human record-keeping, when writing was invented not for literature or law but for counting institutional assets.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet reads as an estate inventory: a courtyard entry, a storage-container category, three units marked with an institutional or divine qualifier, a livestock pen credited with five smaller units, a dairy or milk entry of one larger unit alongside an unreadable sign, five larger units against an uncertain category with the GUL marker, and finally two larger units assigned to 'the land.' The opening rows are broken and their amounts are gone. No names of officials, no dates, no narrative — just the bones of a count, frozen in clay at the very dawn of writing.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineLine 1: [...] — [...] Line 2: [...] — courtyard [KISAL] Line 3: [...] — [GA₂-type container / storehouse, marked HI] Line 4: [...] — [...] Line 5: [...] — 3 [small units]: AN [sky / divine marker] Line 6: 1 [large count] — livestock pen; 5 [small units] Line 7: 1 [large count] — milk / dairy; [X: sign unread] Line 8: 5 [large counts] — [DA marker]: GUL Line 9: 2 [large counts] — the land [KALAM]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , KISAL~b1 [...] , |GA2~a1xHI| [...] , [...] [...] , 3(N57) AN 1(N14) , TUR3~a 5(N57) 1(N14) , GA~a X 5(N14)# , DA~a GUL 2(N14)# , KALAM~g
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 026. 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 (P328728) — 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.
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.