Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 014
About this tablet
A small oval stone tablet from the Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), one of the very earliest administrative records in human history, predating what most people would recognize as 'writing.' It was likely produced by a temple or palace accountant tracking allocations of barley connected with plowing — agricultural work planned or already completed. The obverse is too eroded to read clearly, but the reverse preserves a numerical total alongside signs for grain, distribution, and the plow. Objects like this are the direct ancestors of later Sumerian cuneiform and represent the moment when human beings first began recording economic transactions in lasting physical form.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Most of this tablet is too damaged to read. What survives on the back face records a quantity — something on the order of sixty-two-plus units in a mixed notation — of barley, apparently being distributed or allocated in connection with plowing activity. The preceding lines, which likely listed individual sub-totals against named recipients or fields, are broken away or too eroded to decipher. The tablet is essentially a ledger entry: grain out, for agricultural use.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] 1(N01)# , X X [...] 3(N01)# , [...] 3(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 6(N14)# 2(N01)# 1(N24)# , [X] barley (SZE~a) — distribution (BA#) — plow / plowing (APIN~a#)
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)# , X X [...] 3(N01)# , [...] 3(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 6(N14)# 2(N01)# 1(N24)# , X SZE~a BA# APIN~a#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 014. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005081) — 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.