Position in chronology
CUSAS 31, 055
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the very oldest forms of writing in human history. It appears to record quantities of salt — or some commodity conventionally read as salt — alongside numerical notations whose exact values depend on which counting system was in use. The lower entries involve compound signs combining what may be a time or day marker with numerical elements, suggesting a tally of disbursements or receipts organized by period. Such tablets were the bookkeeping tools of early Mesopotamian institutions, invented not for literature but for managing grain, salt, and livestock.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records allocations of what appears to be salt: one entry lists 5 units, another 3 units. A further line records a quantity of 20 (two higher-order units). Then come two entries distinguished by compound time-or-period markers: 5 units assigned to one period-type, and 4 units to another, with an additional sign (ZATU669) whose meaning is unclear. The surrounding lines are too damaged or broken to read. The overall picture is a short administrative tally — quantities of a commodity distributed or measured across different time periods or categories.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[KISZ?] [...] Salt: 5 [units] [...] Salt: 3 [units] [...] 20 [...] [...] 5 [units], |day×3(N57)| 4 [units], |day×1(N57)| [ZATU669] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
, KISZ# [...] , MUN~a1 5(N01) [...] , MUN~a1 3(N01) [...] 2(N14) [...] 5(N01) , |U4x3(N57)| 4(N01) , |U4x1(N57)| ZATU669 [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 31, 055. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (P433198) — 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.