Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 081
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), recording allocations of barley — probably as travel or road-rations disbursed from an institutional storehouse. The responsible official is identified by the title sanga, the chief institutional administrator or temple accountant in this early bureaucratic system. Several lines are broken or lost, but the surviving entries follow the standard Uruk-era format of quantity on one side of a ruling line, commodity and destination label on the other. Tablets like this are among the earliest written records in human history: clay ledgers produced by a new priestly-administrative class managing the flow of grain through southern Mesopotamia's temple households.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The legible portions record a disbursement of barley from a storehouse, apparently as rations for road-travel or a journey — a set amount drawn and accounted for. A sanga official (the institution's chief administrator) is named, anchoring the transaction within a temple or palace household. Further barley entries follow, though most of their quantities or labels are now lost. The tablet closes with four units of an unstated commodity. Several lines in the middle are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N34) — road-ration; 3(N57) [from/to] storehouse(?); barley[?] 1(N19) — [personal designation?]; delivered[?] [...] [...] — [...] [ZATU737×DI] — sanga (temple administrator) [...] 1(N14) 1(N19) — barley [...] — barley 4(N19) — [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(N34) , KASKAL 3(N57) E2~a SZE~a# 1(N19) , I DU# [...] [...] , [...] |ZATU737xDI| SANGA~a [...] 1(N14) 1(N19) , SZE~a [...] , SZE~a 4(N19) ,
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 081. 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 (P325750) — 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.