Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 125
About this tablet
An administrative accounting tablet from the Uruk period, dating to roughly 3300–3000 BCE — among the earliest written records in human history. It pairs small numerical entries with institutional designations: different types of storehouses, a jar of beer, a storage mound, and what appears to be a supervisory title connected to the Tigris River region. This format — number on the left, commodity or category label on the right — is the basic grammar of Uruk-period bookkeeping, used to track the flow of goods in and out of large temple storehouses. The tablet is heavily damaged at the beginning and end, but the surviving middle section is legible enough to identify a running tally of institutional allocations or receipts.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The first two lines are too damaged to read fully, but both reference storehouses. The clearest entries show: five large mixed-measure storehouses, six units of a measured quantity, one jar of beer, one entry now entirely lost, one item of uncertain category associated with a storage mound, and one item linked to a supervisor in the Tigris region. The final two lines are completely broken. What survives reads like a tally sheet — goods received or assigned at an institutional building — written at the very moment when humanity was first learning to use marks on clay as a substitute for memory.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] — storehouse [...] — [damaged sign]; [compound] storehouse [with large N57 measure] 5 — large [mixed-]measure storehouse 6 — [mixed-]measure [units] 1 — jar of beer 1[?] — [...] 1 — [BULUG3 category] at [the] mound 1 — Tigris [area]; supervisor [...] — [...] [...] — [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , E2~a [...] , X# |E2~ax1(N57)@t| 5(N01) , GAL~a |SILA3~axHI| E2~a 6(N01) , |SILA3~axHI| 1(N01) , DUG~a KASZ~a 1(N01)# , [...] 1(N01) , BULUG3 DU6~a 1(N01) , IDIGNA PAP~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 125. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 51-00-016 (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, P330073). 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.