Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 107
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged accounting tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the earliest phases of writing in human history. It records quantities of people or commodities — including what appear to be female workers, fish, and a reference to the city of Uruk — under a system of numerical signs whose exact values depend on the commodity being counted. Tablets like this are the bureaucratic backbone of the world's first cities: temple administrators tracking rations, workers, or goods in the simplest possible written shorthand. Because it comes from an uncertain excavation context, the precise institution or transaction it documents cannot be identified, but its content fits the large class of Uruk proto-cuneiform administrative records concerned with labor and food distribution.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] [...] 20, TA~c female HI [...] 3(N19), [elder/ancestor?] Uruk 1(N04) 1(N41), assembly-[group?] person fish 2(N41), TA~c female HI [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] 2(N14) , TA~c SAL HI [...] 3(N19) , PAP~a# UNUG~a 1(N04) 1(N41) , UKKIN~a NA~a KU6~a 2(N41) , TA~c SAL HI [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 107. 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 (P325758) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-12/v4-interpretation).
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The earliest historical document in human history.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.