Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 076
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the late Uruk / Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Tablets of this type were the very first writing in human history — not yet a language in the full sense, but a system of signs used to record goods, quantities, and institutional actors. The surviving signs suggest the recording of commodities or rations associated with a road-journey or travel allocation, possibly involving honey or a similar commodity, under the authority of a high-ranking office-holder. Its precise subject cannot be recovered because of the severe breakage, but it belongs to the world of early Mesopotamian palace or temple bookkeeping.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives on this tablet records a quantity (using the metrological unit N57) linked to what appears to be an institutional sign (EN2 × É), followed by a reference to a road or journey and a carpenter or craftsman's name. Further entries mention an EN official and a sign possibly meaning water or liquid, then a designation of SI, and finally what may be honey or syrup alongside a sign associated with a female person or divine figure. Most of the tablet is too broken to read coherently; the rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2(N57) [sign: EN2 × É~b]? KASKAL, NAGAR~a [damaged sign] [...] [...] [damaged sign] [...] [damaged sign] EN~a [damaged sign] A [...] [damaged sign] SI [...] LAL2~a, MUSZ3~a
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
, 2(N57) |EN2xE2~b|? , KASKAL NAGAR~a# X [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X EN~a# X A [...] , [...] SI# [...] , LAL2~a# MUSZ3~a#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 076. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005143) — 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.