Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 065
About this tablet
A livestock accounting tablet from the Uruk period, dating to roughly 3300–3000 BCE and almost certainly from southern Iraq — making it one of the oldest written documents in human history. Each entry pairs a number with one or more animal types: sheep, goats, and a large caprid, likely deer or ibex. This is the kind of tablet that reveals why writing was invented in the first place: not for poetry or religion, but for keeping count. A temple or palace administrator was tallying animals — probably stock moving through a central storehouse — and the closing notation identifies either the official responsible or the administrative category under which these animals were filed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Fifty-two deer and sheep. Twenty-five sheep and goats. Eight sheep of an unclear subcategory. One line is too damaged to read. Twenty-seven deer and goats. Fifty-two young or small goats. Three sheep. Eighteen sheep and goats under a specific disbursement category. The tablet closes with a separator mark and what appears to be the title or designation of the supervising official — the person accountable for this entire count.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine52 — male deer [and] sheep 25 — sheep [and] goats 8 — [X] [uncertain sign] sheep [...] — [deposited/dedicated?] [...] 27 — male deer [and] goats 52 — goats, young/small 3 — [uncertain sign] sheep 18 — sheep [and] goats [disbursement category] [separator marker] [overseer/category marker]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
5(N14) 2(N01) , DARA4~c2 UDU~a 2(N14) 5(N01) , UDU~a MASZ2 8(N01) , X SZE3# UDU~a [...] , RU# [...] 2(N14) 7(N01) , DARA4~c2 MASZ 5(N14) 2(N01) , MASZ2 TUR# 3(N01) , SZE3# UDU~a 1(N14) 8(N01) , UDU~a# MASZ BAR DA~a# [PA~a]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 065. 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 (P006380) — 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.