Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 045
About this tablet
This is a proto-cuneiform livestock accounting tablet from the Uruk period, roughly 3200–3000 BCE, one of the very earliest forms of writing in human history. It records two groups of sheep and lambs — ewes, rams, young animals of mixed category — tallied under institutional headings whose exact meaning we cannot yet fully recover. The tablet is held at Cornell University and is part of a broader corpus of early Sumerian administrative records that show writing emerging not for literature or religion, but for the bookkeeping demands of large temple economies. Its significance lies in the sheer antiquity of the counting impulse: numbers came before narrative.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records two separate livestock lots. The first group comprises 28 ewes, 13 rams, 2 animals of a category called KIR11, and 8 mountain-type lambs, assigned to an official or category designated DA/PA. The second group has 9 ewes, 7 rams, 2 KIR11, and 3 mountain-type lambs, noted under a disbursement or receipt formula. Summary totals at the bottom give 51 animals under the DA/PA heading and 21 under the receipt/disbursement formula — the closing accounting line of what appears to be a two-entry flock record.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine28 ewes, 13 rams, 2 KIR11, 8 [animals of] KUR~a type, lambs DA~a PA~a 9 ewes, 7 rams, 2 KIR11, 3 [animals of] KUR~a type, lambs |BU~a+DU6~a| SZU |GISZxSZU2~a| ZATU752 |BU~a+DU6~a| SZU |GISZxSZU2~a| 51 [total?] DA~a PA~a 21 |BU~a+DU6~a| SZU |GISZxSZU2~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(N14) 8(N01) , U8# 1(N14) 3(N01) , UDUNITA~a 2(N01) , KIR11 8(N01) , KUR~a SILA4~c DA~a PA~a 9(N01)# , U8# 7(N01) , UDUNITA~a 2(N01) , KIR11 3(N01) , KUR~a SILA4~c |BU~a+DU6~a| SZU |GISZxSZU2~a| ZATU752 |BU~a+DU6~a| SZU |GISZxSZU2~a| 5(N14) 1(N01) , DA~a PA~a 2(N14) 1(N01) , |BU~a+DU6~a| SZU |GISZxSZU2~a|
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 045. 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 (P325347) — 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.