Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 154
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the late Uruk or Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), now held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The surviving signs suggest a record of commodities or rations being disbursed or received — the kind of everyday accounting that represents the very earliest writing in human history. Signs such as BA (disbursement marker), SZU (receipt/delivery), ZI~a (possibly flour or rations), and GIR3 (possibly transport or delivery) point to a transaction list, though the damage is severe enough that the specific commodity, quantities, and personnel involved are mostly lost. This tablet is a reminder that writing was invented not for literature or religion, but for the unglamorous business of tracking goods.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is fragmentary. One entry records a single unit of something received or disbursed — 'into the hand of' someone whose name is broken away. Further lines record what appear to be allocations: a distribution (BA), a receipt or ration of what may be flour or a similar commodity (SZU ZI~a), and a delivery or transport notation (GIR3 DI). The final line contains a date or summary marker involving the sun/day sign alongside other damaged signs. Most of the tablet's content — the names, quantities, and full transaction details — is too broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N01)# , SZU2# [...] , [...] — , BA — , SZU ZI~a — , GIR3@g~b DI [...] , [...] |U4×2(N01).X|# 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 [...] 1(N01)# , SZU2# [...] , [...] , BA , SZU ZI~a , GIR3@g~b DI [...] , [...] |U4x2(N01).X|# X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 154. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005221) — 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.