Position in chronology
CUSAS 31, 162
About this tablet
A small, badly broken proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the late Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), recording allocations or tallies of commodities — most likely grain (barley), livestock (sheep), and institutional goods — under the authority of an EN-official, the highest office-holder of an early Mesopotamian institution. The repeated entries for grain-storehouse signs (AB~a with barley insets) in the lower half suggest this is a summary or sub-total section of a larger redistribution or inventory account. No findspot is recorded; like many Uruk-period tablets, it survives in private hands and cannot be tied to a specific excavated archive. It belongs to humanity's earliest tradition of written record-keeping, before writing had yet evolved into a fully linguistic system.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The top of the tablet is broken away. What survives records several commodity entries: 2 units of sheep and barley under an EN-official; then a separate tally of 3 units of some collected good (possibly wool or fleece); 1 unit each of two unidentified categories; 2 units of barley under the EN-official plus a larger quantity marked AN. The lower section gives running totals: 20 units of grain assigned to a particular storehouse type, then 13 units handled by a ŠU-official from the same storehouse, and finally at least 33 units from the same storehouse — though the last line is too damaged to read in full.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] MEN~a SZAGAN GISZ 2 (units), sheep, barley , lord/EN-official [...] 3 (N57 units), [commodity: fleece/wool collection?] 1 (unit), [ZATU850] [ZATU850] 1 (unit), [NAM2] RU 2 (units), barley, lord/EN-official, 1 (N04 units), AN [...] 20 (units), lord/EN-official, [grain-storehouse type A], [grain-storehouse type B] 13 (units), ŠU, [grain-storehouse type A], [grain-storehouse type B] [30+?] 3 (units), [grain-storehouse type A], [grain-storehouse type B?]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] [...] MEN~a SZAGAN GISZ# 2(N01) , UDU~a SZE~a , EN~a [...] 3(N57) , UR4~b 1(N01) , ZATU850 ZATU850 1(N01) , NAM2 RU 2(N01) , SZE~a EN~a 1(N04) , AN [...] 2(N14) , EN~a |AB~ax(SZE~a&SZE~a)| |AB~ax1(N04)| 1(N14) 3(N01) , SZU |AB~ax(SZE~a&SZE~a)| |AB~ax1(N04)|# 3(N14)# [3(N01)] , |AB~ax(SZE~a&SZE~a)|# [|AB~ax1(N04)|]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 31, 162. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: private: anonymous, unlocated (P235782) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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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.