Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 109
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the very earliest forms of writing ever produced. It records quantities of goods — probably grain rations or similar commodities — distributed from or allocated to a storehouse or institutional building. The repeated notations for disbursement and building-type suggest this was routine bookkeeping by a temple or palace administrator. Tablets like this, covered in impressed numerals and a handful of pictographic signs rather than full sentences, represent the birth of the written record: writing invented not for poetry or history, but for counting things.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [damaged sign] [...] 1(N46) 1(N14) 1(N57) , house-type-A | disbursement 5(N19) 2(N57) , house-type-A [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N46) 6(N19) , disbursement | house-type-A
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X [...] 1(N46)# 1(N14) 1(N57) , E2~a BA 5(N19) 2(N57) , E2~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N46) 6(N19) , BA E2~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 109. 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 (P328729) — 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The earliest historical document in human history.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.