Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 150
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform tablet from the Uruk/Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), now held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records what appear to be entries for livestock — almost certainly sheep — accompanied by qualifiers that may indicate age, size, or status categories, along with possible date or sun/day markers. The tablet is too fragmentary and the proto-cuneiform signs too poorly understood to reconstruct a complete transaction, but the format — numerical notation followed by a commodity sign and descriptors — is characteristic of the earliest administrative record-keeping in Mesopotamia. It offers a glimpse into the very beginnings of writing, used here not for literature but for livestock management.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening lines are too damaged to read fully, but what survives records something like fodder or plant material in the first entry. The next entries each account for one sheep, distinguished by descriptors that may indicate age class or quality: one is described as 'large' with a designation that might mean 'old' or a particular grade, while another carries additional status markers whose meaning is not yet fully understood. The tablet is a fragmentary livestock register — the rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , fodder(?) A 1(N01) , MU [ZATU714×HI] [1(N01)] , [sheep] |U4.(1(N14).5(N08))| large SZAB [1(N01)] , [sheep] |U4×X| DI GIR3
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , U2~b#? A 1(N01)# , MU# |ZATU714xHI@g~a|# [1(N01)] , [UDU~a] |U4.(1(N14).5(N08))|# GAL~a SZAB~a [1(N01)] , [UDU~a] |U4xX|# DI GIR3@g~b#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 150. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005217) — 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.