Position in chronology
MSVO 1, 234
About this tablet
A small and badly damaged administrative tablet from Jemdet Nasr, dating to the late Uruk period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It records allocations or ration assignments involving a carpenter, a cattle-stall or institutional building, female workers or animals, and a plowing unit — overseen or categorised under a sanga (temple administrator). Tablets like this are among the very earliest written documents in human history, capturing the economic management of a complex urban institution before writing had fully developed into a language for recording speech. The surviving numbers (3, 2, 2, 1) are commodity or personnel counts, and the entries are too fragmentary to reconstruct a single coherent transaction.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet records a series of institutional allocations: a carpenter's rotation or assignment, possibly tied to a head-count; rations linked to a storehouse and female workers (the number 3); a ration deduction or balance of 2; 2 units associated with a cattle-stall and a remainder or leftover allocation; and 1 plowing unit whose full entry is broken away. The first and last legible lines mention the sanga — the temple's chief administrator — suggesting the whole record falls under that official's accounting authority. Several lines are too damaged or broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] SANGA~a ME~a UB [...] , [...] NAGAR~a carpenter BALA~a rotation/term SAG person/head [...] , [...] ME~a [?] [...] , [...] X DU deliver/go A 3(N01) , storehouse (E2~a) |1(N58).BAD~a|? woman/female (SAL) 2(N01) , GAR ration LA2 deduction SA~a 2(N01) , cattle-stall (AB~a) TAK4~a remainder KI place GAR ration 1(N14) , plow (APIN~a) [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] TAR~a? cut/assign SANGA~a administrator
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] SANGA~a ME~a UB [...] , [...] NAGAR~a# BALA~a SAG# [...] , [...] ME~a#? [...] , [...] X DU A 3(N01) , E2~a |1(N58).BAD~a|? SAL 2(N01) , GAR LA2 SA~a 2(N01) , AB~a TAK4~a KI GAR 1(N14) , APIN~a# [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] TAR~a? SANGA~a#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 234. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005301) — 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.