Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 064
About this tablet
A proto-cuneiform livestock accounting tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), now held at Cornell University. The legible entries track quantities of she-goats and goats sorted into administrative categories — probably marking quality grades, disbursement status, or wool output — with a grand total in the damaged final line. The tablet belongs to the very earliest tradition of writing in human history: Uruk-period administrators pressing this kind of grid-and-number clay record into existence purely to manage herds and goods, not yet to express language. Several entries are broken away, and one archaic sign (ZATU773~a) has no established reading even today.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads roughly as follows: 25 she-goats in a category labeled BAR; an unidentified heading or category sign; then a partially broken entry for goats with wool; 20 goats also in the BAR-and-wool category; followed by two administrative markers — likely an official's designation or a sub-account divider. A final line, now damaged, seems to give a running or grand total somewhere in the low hundreds, but the exact figure cannot be read with confidence. The opening entry and one middle row are broken away entirely.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] | [...] 25 | she-goat(s) — BAR ZATU773~a [archaic sign of unknown reading] [...] | [...] [3×10...]+1 | goat(s) — wool 20 | goat(s) — BAR, wool DA~a PA~a [3×60?]+7# | [...]#
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) 5(N01) , UD5~a BAR ZATU773~a [...] , [...] 3(N14) [...] 1(N01) , MASZ2 SIG2~b 2(N14) , MASZ BAR SIG2~b DA~a PA~a 3(N34)# 7(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 064. 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 (P325228) — 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.