Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 199
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), recording quantities of people or commodities distributed to or associated with named institutional categories — among them a vizier (SUKKAL), a labor force or troops (ERIN), and female workers (SAL). The tablet is cone-shaped or conoid, an unusual physical form for this period, and survives only in fragment. It is one of the earliest types of written records in human history: not literature, not law, but the basic bookkeeping of a temple or palace economy at the dawn of writing itself. The signs are too damaged and the context too incomplete to reconstruct the full transaction, but the entries follow the standard proto-cuneiform format of numeral + commodity/person category.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads something like: '1 [commodity or person] — [category lost]; 1 — NIM~a (a geographic or institutional label, meaning uncertain); 2 — vizier; [number lost] — labor force/troops; 2 — DU, 3 female workers; 2 — PU2 [rest lost]; 1 — [rest lost].' These are ration or allocation entries — small numbers of people or goods assigned to named offices or groups. Most of the surrounding context is too broken to recover.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01) , NIM~a 2(N01) , SUKKAL [...] , ERIN[...] [...] , [...] 2(N01) , DU 3(N57) SAL 2(N01) , PU2[...] 1(N01)[...] , [...]
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) , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01) , NIM~a 2(N01) , SUKKAL [...] , ERIN# [...] , [...] 2(N01) , DU 3(N57) SAL 2(N01) , PU2#? [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 199. 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 (P325170) — 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.