Position in chronology
MSVO 3, 43
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), almost certainly from the city of Uruk in southern Iraq — one of the earliest cities in human history. It records quantities of food commodities, probably fish and bread rations, under institutional headings that may refer to a storehouse or a named official. Tablets like this are among the very first written documents ever made: cuneiform writing began as a bookkeeping tool, and this piece is a direct witness to that invention. The reverse is blank or too eroded to read, and much of the obverse is also damaged, leaving several entries only partially intelligible.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records several small deliveries or ration entries: 2 units of a bread or grain product; 5 units assigned to a gate or entry category; 1 larger unit involving a fish commodity with a day/sun qualifier; 2 units of carp (or a carp-related product). A further line mentions fire or fuel alongside some kind of tool or vessel designation and an elder or supervisory figure, but parts of this line are lost. The final line refers to an enclosure or storehouse and a commodity that may be rope or legumes — but the signs here are only partially preserved and the full meaning cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2(N01@f) , |NINDA2xU4| 5(N01@f) , KA2~b 1(N51) , U4 KU6~a 2(N01@f) , SUHUR [...] NE~a SZITA~a3 X PAP~a [...] [...] |LAGAB~axPA~a|? E2~a GU
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(N01@f) , |NINDA2xU4| 5(N01@f) , KA2~b 1(N51) , U4 KU6~a 2(N01@f) , SUHUR , NE~a SZITA~a3 X PAP~a [...] , |LAGAB~axPA~a|? E2~a GU
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 3, 43. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Bodmer Museum, Cologny, Switzerland (P005354) — 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.