Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 093
About this tablet
A proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), recording quantities of barley alongside labels identifying the transaction type and the responsible officials of a temple institution. The 'great administrator' (sanga gal) and the 'lord' (en) are titles that anchor this text firmly in the bureaucratic world of southern Iraq's earliest cities. Proto-cuneiform tablets of this kind are among the oldest written records on earth — not literature, but ledger-keeping: grain measured, distributed, and signed off by temple functionaries. Several numerical signs are only partially preserved, and a short lacuna in the first entry obscures part of the total.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A record of barley: the first entry tallies a substantial quantity — several large-capacity measures plus smaller fractions — though part of the count is missing where the tablet is broken. A second numerical entry follows without a commodity label, likely a subdivision or related lot. The transaction is characterized as a purchase or exchange, and is connected to a material or category called NAGA (possibly natron or a specific goods class). The responsible institutional authority is the chief temple administrator — the great sanga — along with the lord (en), with a location or place marker and a reed sign closing the record. What comes after the break in line one is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Quantity: 6(N14) (break) 2(N01) 2(N39~a) 1(N24) 1(N30~a)] — barley [Quantity: 4(N19) 4(N41) 1(N24~b)] — purchase/exchange; distribution; NAGA — administrator; administrator; great — lord; place; reed
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
6(N14)# [...] 2(N01)# 2(N39~a)# 1(N24) 1(N30~a) , SZE~a 4(N19)# 4(N41) 1(N24~b) , , SZAM2 BA NAGA~a , SANGA~a SANGA~a GAL~a , EN~a KI GI
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 093. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 50-11-009 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from uncertain (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts, P325225). 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.