Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 106
About this tablet
A small, heavily worn clay tablet from the proto-cuneiform period — roughly 3000 BCE — most likely from Jemdet Nasr in southern Iraq, now held in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It appears to be an administrative or accounting record, listing quantities of goods (probably barley and perhaps reeds or livestock) alongside signs that may denote personnel categories or institutional titles. Tablets like this are among the very earliest written documents in human history, produced by temple or palace administrators to track the movement of commodities. The text is too damaged to reconstruct a complete transaction, but the combination of numerals, a cereal sign, a foot/messenger sign, and a young-animal sign is characteristic of Uruk-period ration or delivery records.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads something like: '1 unit of [commodity unclear] ... 4 units of [commodity], [institutional designation unclear] ... [quantities of] barley, [branch/overseer marker], foot-messenger(?), young animal(s) ... [quantities of] barley, reeds(?), [title or institution unclear].' The tablet is too broken to reconstruct a single coherent transaction; the remaining entries record quantities of barley and other goods associated with what appear to be personnel or institutional categories. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N01), [sign U2~b] [...] 4(N01)[+?] [...], [sign ZATU644~a] [...], barley, [PA~a / branch-overseer sign], foot(-messenger?), |AMAR.2| [...] [...], barley, reed, [AB~a / sea-father-title sign] [...]
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) , U2~b [...] 4(N01)# [...] , ZATU644~a# [...] , SZE~a# PA~a GIR3@g~b |AMAR.1(N02)| [...] [...] , SZE~a# GI AB~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 106. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005173) — 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.