Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 055
About this tablet
An Uruk period administrative tablet from southern Mesopotamia, datable to roughly 3200–3000 BCE, recording sheep — rams and ewes — alongside barley, most likely as fodder rations or a livestock inventory. Signs indicating 'day,' 'received,' and 'year' suggest this is a dated transaction tied to a named official or guardian category. The closing signs (AN and MAR~a) probably mark an institutional affiliation or delivery destination. Tablets like this are among the earliest written records in human history, produced by temple or palace administrators to track the flow of animals and grain through a complex redistributive economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Three measures of barley are recorded for male sheep, logged by day under a guard or dog-handler. One measure goes to a large ram, classed under an official designation and received in a given year. The reverse tallies a larger flock — roughly twenty ewes and ten rams, though the exact count of the large-unit numeral is uncertain. A final notation, probably naming an institution or delivery destination, closes the record. Several signs are damaged and the quantities on the reverse cannot be fully confirmed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 [units] — barley; male sheep — [day] — [guard/dog] 1 [unit] — [barley] — [large] male sheep — [NAM2] — [received/in hand] — [year/name] [2(N15)] 20 — ewes [2(N15)] 10 — male sheep [AN] — [MAR~a]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
3(N01)# SZE3 , UDUNITA~a U4 UR~a 1(N01) , SZE3# UDUNITA~a GAL~a NAM2 SZU MU 2(N15)# 2(N02) , U8 2(N15)# 1(N02) , UDUNITA~a AN# MAR~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 055. 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 (P325756) — 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.