Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 115
About this tablet
A small administrative accounting tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), probably from the site of Jemdet Nasr in southern Iraq, now held in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records quantities of an unidentified commodity — likely grain, animals, or a processed good — assigned to or received by a high-ranking official denoted by the EN sign. This is among the earliest writing in the world: not literature or history, but institutional bookkeeping, the bureaucratic engine that drove the first cities. The tablet is heavily damaged, surviving as several joining and non-joining fragments, and most of its content is lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries record: 20-something units of an unspecified commodity (the exact quantity is damaged), followed by broken lines we can no longer read. One legible section shows 2 units credited to a receipt account, and 3 units of a commodity whose sign we cannot yet identify. The final readable line associates the transaction with a place and with a high official — possibly the lord or chief priest of an institution. Most of the tablet is too broken or worn to reconstruct.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2(N14)[+?] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] X 2(N01) , [into the hand of / received] 3(N01) , [commodity sign ZATU753] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , X X [...] , [...] [place?] [lord/EN-official]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(N14)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] X 2(N01) , SZU2 3(N01) , ZATU753# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , X X [...] , [...] KID~a EN~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 115. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005182) — 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.