Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 202
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the earliest phases of writing in human history. It appears to record allocations or receipts of commodities — likely including beer, a storehouse associated with the Tigris river, and female workers or rations for women — using the round-impression numerals characteristic of proto-cuneiform accounting. Tablets like this are the very beginning of literacy: not literature or law, but the bookkeeping of a complex urban institution, probably a temple or palace storeroom. Its exact provenance is unknown, which limits how precisely we can place it within the administrative landscape of early Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records a series of small allocations, each of quantity '1' (with one larger quantity at the top). The entries mention a woman (or female worker category), a supervisor or elder, a storehouse connected to the Tigris river, and what appears to be beer alongside other goods whose names are too damaged or ambiguous to read clearly. The last legible line refers to something involving fire or fuel, delivery, and a further commodity. Much of the tablet is broken away, and several entries are entirely lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N39~a) , [A] [hand/receipt] woman [...] , [...] 1 , [commodity X] [commodity X] 1 , [elder/supervisor?] [commodity X] [...] 1 , [...] [...] , [...] 1 , storehouse of the Tigris 1 , beer [commodity X] [BU] [...] , [...] [fire/fuel?] [brought/delivered?] [TE] [BU]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] 1(N39~a)# , A# SZU2# SAL [...] , [...] 1(N01) , X X 1(N01) , PAP~a# X [...] 1(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01) , E2~a IDIGNA 1(N01) , KASZ~a X BU~a [...] , [...] NE~a# DU TE BU~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 202. 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 (P325159) — 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.