Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 144
About this tablet
A badly damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), recording quantities of commodities — at minimum barley and several goods whose signs remain undeciphered — under a numerical accounting system. The object is a clay tablet of the characteristic conical or slightly trapezoidal shape typical of the earliest administrative writing from ancient Iraq. Only fragments of the original text survive legibly: numerical entries using the large sexagesimal unit N14 (likely representing quantities of 10 or 20 in some systems) and smaller N01 values alongside complex compound signs whose meanings are not yet established. It is a rare witness to the very invention of writing, used not for literature but for counting and managing goods at an early Mesopotamian institution.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records several commodity allocations in an early accounting format. One entry logs what appears to be 20 units (2×N14) of barley; another records 10 units (1×N14) of something now broken away. A further line counts 3 smaller units (N01) against a cluster of goods identified by signs that scholars have not yet been able to read — including bread or ration deposits alongside two complex compound signs of unknown meaning. Several other lines are too damaged or broken to read. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 2(N14) [...], barley [...] 1(N14) [...], [...] [...], [unknown sign] [...], [...] 3(N01), [commodity signs: HI@g~a, GAR, |ZATU714×HI@g~a|, |ZATU651×GAR|] [...], [...] [...] 2(N14) [...] [...], [...]
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) [...] , SZE~a [...] 1(N14) [...] , [...] [...] , X [...] , [...] 3(N01) , HI@g~a GAR |ZATU714xHI@g~a| |ZATU651xGAR| [...] , [...] [...] 2(N14) [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 144. 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 (P325229) — 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.