Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 146
About this tablet
A fragmentary administrative tablet from the Uruk or Early Dynastic period — among the very earliest written records in human history — recording disbursements or rations of goods (possibly involving natron or a related plant product) to temple administrators, including a senior official. The repeated sign for 'temple administrator' (SANGA) alongside a sign for 'great/chief' suggests a hierarchical institutional context, likely a temple economy. The tablet is broken on multiple edges and survives in several rejoined pieces, making a full reading impossible. It is nonetheless a rare witness to the first emergence of writing as a tool of economic control in ancient Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving text records a series of numbered allocations: five units of one commodity, six units of another (the rest broken), then eleven units of something unreadable. A line then records a consumption or distribution — apparently of a plant product or natron — connected with a date reference and overseen by temple administrators, one of them senior. One further numerical entry follows, and then the text breaks off entirely. Much of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 5(N01) — DU8~c@g 6(N01) [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) — X GU7 NAGA~a |U4×1(N01)| SANGA~a SANGA~a GAL~a 1(N24~b) — [...] [...] — TE# [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] 5(N01) , DU8~c@g 6(N01) [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) , X GU7 NAGA~a |U4x1(N01)| SANGA~a SANGA~a GAL~a 1(N24~b) , [...] [...] , TE# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 146. 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 (P325241) — 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.