Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 142
About this tablet
A heavily damaged administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), found at or near Jemdet Nasr in southern Iraq and now held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records quantities of commodities — at minimum one sheep and some measure of barley and beer — in the standard proto-cuneiform numerical notation of the earliest Mesopotamian bureaucracy. Only the lower portion of the text survives in any legibility; the upper half is almost entirely lost to breakage and surface erosion. Tablets like this are among the very first written documents in human history, produced not for literature but for the practical management of temple or palace stores.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Most of this record is too damaged to read. What survives records individual units — at least one sheep, and toward the bottom of the tablet, a combined entry involving a quantity of barley and beer. Several other entries in the middle of the tablet note single units of unidentified commodities. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X 1(N01) , sheep [...] 1(N01) , X [...] 1(N01) , X X [...] , X X [...] 1(N01) 2(N39~a) , barley — beer — X [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X 1(N01)# , UDU~a# [...] 1(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01)# , X X [...] , X X [...] 1(N01) 2(N39~a) , SZE~a# KASZ~a# X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 142. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005209) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.