Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 230
About this tablet
A small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), likely from Jemdet Nasr in southern Iraq, now held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It appears to record allocations or disbursements — each line carries a numeral (almost always '1') against what seems to be an official title or institutional category: a temple administrator (sanga), a high official (sukkal), and possibly a lion-related entry that may refer to a commodity, a class of personnel, or an animal. The tablet is too damaged and fragmentary to reconstruct a complete accounting transaction, but its structure — one unit against one title per line — is characteristic of Uruk-period personnel lists or ration-allocation records. It offers a rare glimpse into the bureaucratic machinery of the world's earliest cities, where even individual officials received individually tallied allocations.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is heavily broken at the top and on the left side. What survives is a series of entries, each recording '1' unit against an office or category: a storehouse, a head-person, a remainder allocation, a lion-related entry, a temple administrator, a vizier-level official, and a line involving oil or a similar commodity alongside an agricultural term. A final summary line records 13 units against a lost category. The rest of the text — including the opening lines — is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] storehouse [...] , [...] head / person — disbursement — X 1 , X [...] [...] , storehouse — X [...] 1 , TAK4~a — head / person 1 , GIR3@g~b [foot/path sign] [...] , [...] 1 , X — storehouse — lion 1 , sanga (temple administrator) 1 , sukkal (vizier / high official) 1 , [EN2?] 1 , NI~a — AL [...] , [...] ZATU752 13 , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] E2~a# [...] , [...] SAG BAR X 1(N01) , X [...] [...] , E2~a X [...] 1(N01) , TAK4~a SAG 1(N01) , GIR3@g~b#? [...] , [...] 1(N01) , X E2~a# PIRIG~b1 1(N01) , SANGA~a 1(N01) , SUKKAL 1(N01) , EN2#? 1(N01) , NI~a AL [...] , [...] ZATU752 1(N14)# 3(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 230. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005297) — 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.