Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 183
About this tablet
A heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the late Uruk or Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records quantities — expressed in the standard Uruk numerical system — against commodity or category signs including what appear to be a field or container unit (GAN2), a sheep or small livestock sign (UDU~a), and what may be a storehouse or institutional building sign (E2~a), along with a possible disbursement notation (BA SZU). The tablet is fragmentary and heavily eroded, leaving most sign sequences incomplete, but it fits the standard pattern of institutional accounting from early Mesopotamian administrative centers. It is a small piece of the earliest known bureaucratic record-keeping in human history.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Most of this tablet is too damaged to read in full. What survives records a series of quantities: three units of something unidentified; one unit of something; then eleven units associated with a field or container category and a sign that may mean 'life' or serve as a classifier; further on, two units next to an unidentified sign and the archaic sign ZATU750; one unit of sheep or small livestock; eighteen units associated with an unidentified item; and finally a line that seems to reference a storehouse or institutional building, possibly in the context of a disbursement or receipt. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 3(N01), X [...] 1(N01), X [...] [...], [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) [...], GAN2 TI [...] 3(N01), [...] [...], [...] 2(N01), X ZATU750 1(N01), X [...], [...] X [...] 1(N01), X UDU~a[?] [...], [...] X 1(N14) 8(N01), X [...], X BA E2~a[?] SZU [...] 2(N01) [...], [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] 3(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01) , X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) [...] , GAN2 TI [...] 3(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N01)# , X ZATU750 1(N01) , X [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N01) , X UDU~a#? [...] , [...] X 1(N14)# 8(N01)# , X [...] , X BA# E2~a#? SZU [...] 2(N01) [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 183. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005250) — 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.