Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 212
About this tablet
A proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the late Uruk or Jemdet Nasr period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), now held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records quantities — probably of female workers or female-category personnel — grouped under institutional officials including what appears to be a sanga (temple administrator) and an en (high-status lord or institutional head). The notation uses the archaic numerical system typical of the earliest writing, where signs like N14 and N01 denote large and small units of counting. Tablets like this are among the very earliest administrative documents in human history: they show a centralised institution keeping track of labor or rations, long before any connected narrative writing existed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records several groups of female workers (or female-category personnel) in numerical entries: one large unit (N14) plus seven small units (N01) of female highland workers assigned to one category; another large unit of female highland workers together with male workers under an unclear heading; and a subtotal of two large units plus seven small units of female highland workers distributed across storage compartments or sub-divisions, under the authority of a supervisory official and an institutional head. The opening line is too damaged to read fully, and several signs throughout remain uncertain. The rest is largely lost to breakage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] DAḪ? X |SAGxMA|? KI? 1(N14) 7(N01) , |SAL.KUR~a| |SAGxMA| 1(N14) , |SAL.KUR~a| ERIM~a X [...] [2(N14)] 7(N01)? , |SAL.KUR~a|? UB PA~a? |SAGxMA|? SANGA~a? X EN~a? 1(N04)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
, DAH# X |SAGxMA|# KI# 1(N14) 7(N01) , |SAL.KUR~a| |SAGxMA| 1(N14) , |SAL.KUR~a| ERIM~a X [...] [2(N14)] 7(N01)# , |SAL.KUR~a|# UB PA~a#? |SAGxMA|# SANGA~a# X EN~a# 1(N04)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 212. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005279) — 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.