Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 205
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Kish, dating to the late Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), now held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records a short list of commodities — goats, sheep, and what appear to be garments or textiles — each entered in quantities of one, with a total of six sheep in one line. The tablet is one of the very earliest forms of writing in human history: not literature but accountancy, the kind of tally a temple administrator would use to track livestock and goods. The presence of garment signs alongside animals is intriguing and may suggest a mixed disbursement or delivery record.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet lists a handful of items, probably goods being tracked or distributed: one goat assigned to a divine or storage bin, one goat of a particular quality or origin (possibly eastern or Elamite), one garment going to a storage compartment, six sheep, and one more garment — the destination of that last entry is broken away and lost. The first line records some kind of delivery or movement notation, but the signs are too damaged to read fully. The rest is missing.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N01) [vessel/object?], GIR3@g [foot/delivery marker] X [...] 1(N01) [unit], goat — AN UB [divine/celestial bin?] 1(N01) [unit], goat — SZIR~a [unknown commodity/quality marker] NIM~b1 [high/eastern?] 1(N01) [unit], garment(?) — UB [bin/corner] 6(N01) [units], sheep 1(N01) [unit], garment(?) [...]
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)# , GIR3@g~b# X [...] 1(N01) , MASZ2 AN UB 1(N01) , MASZ2 SZIR~a? NIM~b1 1(N01) , TUG2~a#? UB# 6(N01) , UDU~a 1(N01) , TUG2~a? [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 205. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005272) — 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.