CUSAS 01, 053

~3100 BCE·Uruk Period·P325736

About this tablet

A small livestock accounting tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the earliest administrative documents in human history. A temple or palace official recorded a tally of different categories of small livestock — ewes, rams, she-goats, and goats — perhaps as a daily or periodic count of animals entering, leaving, or held in an institutional pen. The 'NUN~b' entries likely mark a quality grade or source category for some of the animals. The tablet is heavily worn and partially broken, but its format — numbers paired with animal signs in a ruled grid — is completely typical of the proto-cuneiform bookkeeping system that preceded true writing.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

This tablet records a count of small livestock across two sections. The first section lists: 2 ewes, 2 rams, 2 she-goats, 5 goats, 1 animal of an unclear type, and 3 animals in a special category (possibly a quality grade or origin designation), followed by another 5 goats. Several lines in the middle are too damaged to read. The second section, on the reverse, resumes with 2 she-goats, 3 more in the special category, and then a final entry — a higher numerical notation alongside what appears to be a generic 'sheep' entry. The rest is lost or too broken to recover.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

Obverse: 2 ewes 2 rams 2 she-goats 5 goats 1 [...] 3 [NUN~b category] 5 goats [...] [...] [...] [...] Reverse / lower section: 2 [...] 2 she-goats 3 [NUN~b category] [...] [...] 2(N14) [...] sheep

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)# , U8
2(N01)# , UDUNITA~a
2(N01)# , UD5~a
5(N01)# , MASZ2
1(N01) , [...]
3(N01) , NUN~b
5(N01) MASZ2
[...] , [...]
[...] , [...]
2(N01)# , [...]
2(N01) , UD5~a
3(N01) , NUN~b
[...] , [...]
2(N14)# [...] , UDU~a

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 053. 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 (P325736) — 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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