Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 071
About this tablet
One of the earliest written documents in human history — a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), held at Cornell University. It records small quantities of a variety of commodities: garden produce under a divine or institutional designation, barley, fish stored at a temple courtyard, timber, and what may be a female worker. The closing lines on the reverse, a receipt formula tied to 'the city,' mark the whole account as a disbursement or intake record for an urban institutional storehouse, most likely a temple. Tablets like this are the world's first spreadsheets — practical record-keeping invented before writing had developed grammar, narrative, or literature.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet logs a series of small commodity allocations: two units each of some kind of divine-garden produce, barley, and fish held at the courtyard, plus two units of an item the damaged surface leaves unidentifiable. Single units follow: timber, a woman or female worker, goods delivered to the storehouse under an official or category designation, and one further item whose sign has not yet been identified. Several lines in the middle are too broken to read. The reverse closes the whole account with a city-disbursement formula, recorded twice — the ancient equivalent of a signed receipt stamp.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 units — [AN]-garden / AN 2 units — barley / UR5 2 units — [broken] [...] — A (water?) 2 units — fish / courtyard 2 units — [unidentified sign] 1 unit — timber (GISZ3) 1 unit — [...] woman / female [worker?] 1 unit — [brought to] storehouse / NAM2 1 unit — [ZATU659: sign unidentified] —— Disbursement (SZU2): city (URU) [ZATU659: sign unidentified] Disbursement (SZU2) — city (URU) [closing formula]
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) , AN SAR~b AN 2(N01) , SZE~a UR5~a 2(N01) , [...] [...] , A 2(N01) , KU6~a KISAL~b1 2(N01) , X 1(N01) , GISZ3~b 1(N01) , [...] SAL 1(N01) , TUM~d E2~a NAM2 1(N01) , ZATU659 SZU2 , URU~a1 ZATU659 SZU2 URU~a1
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 071. 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 (P325242) — 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.