Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 044
About this tablet
A small, badly broken accounting tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), recording quantities of livestock — specifically rams and goats — alongside what may be an oven-related commodity or institutional category. The notation system uses impressed circular and wedge-shaped number signs rather than phonetic writing, placing this firmly among the earliest economic records in human history. Tablets like this were used by temple or palace administrators in ancient Mesopotamia to track animal herds, rations, and goods. The fragment is too damaged to recover the full account, but the surviving entries show at least two livestock categories with their respective totals.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this account records: 32 units of an oven-related or heat-processed commodity; 42 rams; and an uncertain number of goats. Several lines are broken beyond recovery. A lower section preserves larger numerical totals — including a figure combining units of different denominations — but the commodities or headings those totals belong to are lost. The rest of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 3(N14) 2(N01) — UTUA~a [oven-product/heated-vessel category] 4(N14) 2(N01) — UDUNITA~a [rams/male sheep] [...] 2(N14) [...] 2(N01) — MASZ2 [goats/caprids] [...] [...] [...] [...] 4(N01) — [...] BU~a [...] UR2# [...] [...] [...] [...] 1(N48) [...] 3(N34) [...] [...] 4(N34) 3(N14) 2(N01) [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] 3(N14) 2(N01) , UTUA~a 4(N14) 2(N01) , UDUNITA~a [...] 2(N14) [...] 2(N01) , MASZ2# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 4(N01) , [...] BU~a [...] UR2# [...] [...] , [...] [...] 1(N48) [...] 3(N34) [...] [...] 4(N34) 3(N14) 2(N01) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 044. 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 (P328734) — 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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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.