Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 061
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE, making it among the very earliest written records in human history. A temple or palace accountant used it to track small allocations — she-goats brought to a storage facility, single units disbursed to various categories of personnel or commodity bins, and what appears to be a grain-storage entry. The tablet is broken on the left and at both ends, so the full list and any totals are lost. What survives is a snapshot of the meticulous record-keeping that drove the world's first urban economies in southern Iraq.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries read roughly as follows: some number of she-goats were delivered to a storehouse (how many is lost). Then, one unit was given or deposited — to whom or where is broken away. After a gap, the list continues: one junior official or small-category item; one disbursement to an AN-NAMESZDA functionary; one measure of flour or grain from a storage compartment. The beginning of the tablet and the final two entries are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] she-goat(s), [storehouse/container?], (sign unclear) — delivered/brought 1 — given/deposited [...] [...] — [...] 1 — junior [official or small unit] 1 — AN-NAMESZDA [official or recipient category] 1 — [granary-bin] flour/grain [...] — [...] [...] — [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] UD5~a# GA2~a1# X DU 1(N01) RU [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01) , TUR BU~a 1(N01) , AN NAMESZDA 1(N01) , UB ZI~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 061. 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 (P325490) — 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.