Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 163
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from the Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3000 BCE), now held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records quantities of commodities — likely including fruit, a container type, a fermented or plant product, and a possible institutional or locative reference to the city of Uruk. Tablets like this are among the earliest written documents ever produced, predating readable Sumerian by several centuries; they capture the administrative machinery of one of the world's first urban economies, but their precise meaning often remains beyond full recovery. The signs here are typical of the archaic accounting tradition: numeric notations paired with commodity ideograms, with no connecting grammar as later scribes would use.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet lists several small quantities of goods: 1 unit of MA (a container or boat-vessel type), 4 units of apple or orchard fruit, 2 units of [MA] with an uncertain accompanying sign, 1 unit of a storehouse or container compound, and 1 unit of an assembly or beverage-related compound. It also notes something deposited or dedicated involving oil or fat, 3 units of an uncertain category (possibly associated with a divine or serpent symbol), and a reference to the city of Uruk. The middle section of the obverse is too damaged to read fully, and several signs remain without secure translations.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 N01 — MA 4 N01 — HASZHUR [apple/orchard fruit] 2 N01 [broken] — [MA] ZATU735~b 1 N01 — |GA2~a1 × GESZTU~c5| [storehouse/container compound] 1 N01 — |UKKIN~b × DIN| [assembly/beverage compound?] — |NI~a . RU| [oil/fat dedicated/deposited?] — 3 N57 MUSZ3~a [three units of snake/divine category?] — UNUG~a [Uruk]
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) , MA 4(N01) , HASZHUR# 2(N01)# [...] , [MA] ZATU735~b# 1(N01) , |GA2~a1xGESZTU~c5|# 1(N01) , |UKKIN~bxDIN| , |NI~a.RU| , 3(N57) MUSZ3~a , UNUG~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 163. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005230) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.