Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 135
About this tablet
This is a fragmentary proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the earliest stages of writing in human history. It appears to record the distribution or delivery of agricultural and material commodities — barley, timber, reeds, and possibly silver — associated with a high-ranking official or institution (the 'EN', a lord or temple chief). Proto-cuneiform tablets like this are not yet fully decipherable in the linguistic sense; the signs record categories and quantities but cannot be read aloud in any language we can reconstruct with certainty. Its significance lies in showing how the very first scribes used notation to track institutional resources nearly five thousand years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records a series of commodity allocations or deliveries, but much of the text is broken. What survives shows: barley distributed; one unit involving a field or settlement plot; a small count (three units of some kind) linked to a storehouse or boundary; and two entries each associated with a high official (the EN), recording deliveries of wood, carp-pond reeds, timber, branches, and precious metal — along with something involving water and a junior or smaller category. The final lines are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] barley — distributed 1 unit — field / plot, RU UR2, settlement 3(N57) — storehouse(s)? / units, SZU2, ZAG 1 unit — lord/EN: brought/delivered, wood, carp-pond reed, timber, branch, silver/precious metal, [commodity X] 1 unit — lord/EN: water, brought/delivered, small/junior, [commodity X] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , SZE~a BA 1(N01)# , GAN2 RU UR2 URU~a1 3(N57) SZU2 ZAG~a 1(N01) , EN~a DU# GISZ SUHUR# GI GISZ3~a PA~a KU3~a A X 1(N01) , EN~a A DU# TUR X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 135. 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 (P325072) — 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.