Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 084
About this tablet
A heavily broken proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), now surviving as several disconnected fragments held at Cornell University. The readable entries record numerical quantities — probably of grain or rations — alongside category signs for personnel (SZUBUR, a class of dependent workers or people from the Subir region) and an archaic sign conventionally read as 'tablet' or 'record.' The PAP~a sign likely marks a supervising official or heading. The tablet is too fragmentary to reconstruct a single coherent transaction, but its structure — quantities in one column, commodity or category designations in another — is the standard bookkeeping format of the earliest literate bureaucracy in human history.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
[Opening broken.] Eight units — under the supervisor/official heading: SZUBUR (dependent workers). One large unit — [entry lost]. [Broken] — tablet/record. One large unit — [entry lost]. Two units — [entry lost]. [Broken] two units — [broken] barley, tablet/record [rest broken]. The surrounding context is lost; what survives are fragments of what was once a multi-entry administrative register tracking personnel categories and, in at least one line, a grain commodity.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] | [...] 8(N14)[damaged] | PAP~a (supervisor/official): SZUBUR (dependent workers / Subarians) 1(N45) | [...] [...] | DUB~a (tablet / record-category) 1(N45) | [...] 2(N14) | [...] [...] 2(N34) | [...] SZE~a (barley/cereal), DUB~a[damaged] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] 8(N14)# , PAP~a SZUBUR 1(N45) , [...] [...] , DUB~a 1(N45) , [...] 2(N14) , [...] [...] 2(N34) , [...] SZE~a DUB~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 084. 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 (P328732) — 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.