Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 118
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3400–3000 BCE), one of the very earliest phases of writing in human history. It records quantities of goods or commodities — likely rations, foodstuffs, or stored items — using the round impressed numerals characteristic of archaic Mesopotamian accounting. Several signs remain unidentified or too worn to read securely. Tablets like this are not 'literature' in any modern sense; they are the bureaucratic paperwork of an early temple or palatial economy, tracking allocations with a precision that predates conventional language representation in writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is a commodity tally: one unit of something, then an entry involving an unidentified container or storage category with a name or year marker, followed by further allocations — one unit of bread/ration with an enclosure sign, two units associated with a day or sun marker and a ration entry, and three larger units of an unspecified good. One additional larger-unit entry appears at the bottom. The beginning and several lines are broken away entirely, and the rest is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] [...] [...] 1(N01) [...] ZATU714 [inner-part / container?] MU [...] [...] X [...] [...] 1(N01) , GAR LAGAB~b 2(N01) , U4 GAR 3(N14) , [...] [...] 1(N14) , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01) , [...] ZATU714# SZA3~a1# MU [...] [...] , X [...] [...] 1(N01) , GAR LAGAB~b 2(N01) , U4 GAR 3(N14) , [...] [...] 1(N14) , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 118. 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 (P325763) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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.