Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 471
About this tablet
A small administrative account from Umma in southern Iraq, written in the Early Dynastic period (early third millennium BCE) — among the oldest bookkeeping documents in existence. The surviving entries count small batches of goods in fours and twos: goats, young calves, birds, and what appears to be a bread or ration measure, some of them connected to an 'en', a high temple or civic official. Too damaged to reconstruct the full transaction, it nonetheless shows the everyday counting of animals and food that literacy was invented to manage.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tally sheet, badly worn. The first two entries are lost. Then: four of something involving goats; four items handed over or deposited; four of first-quality goods; a lost number of francolin-type birds; another broken entry; four calves connected with the lord (the en-official), apparently disbursed; and two units of a bread- or ration-measure. A final line mentioning the same ration sign trails off into damage, and the rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] — [...] [...] — [...] 4 — ...(UR?) ... goat(s), DA 4 — given/deposited (RU) 4 — USZ(?), first quality [...] — [...] dar-bird(s) (francolin?) [...] — [...] DA, GA(?) 4 — calf/calves, the EN (lord/priest-ruler), disbursed(?) 2 — E2(?), BU, NINDA2xNE (ration/bread-measure sign) [...] — NINDA2xNE, two illegible signs, [...] (remainder broken)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] 4(N01@f)# , UR#? X MASZ2# DA~a# 4(N01@f) , RU 4(N01@f) , USZ~b? SAG [...] , [...] DAR~a#? MUSZEN# [...] , [...] DA~a# GA~a#? 4(N01@f) , AMAR EN~a BA? 2(N01@f) , E2~a? BU~a |NINDA2xNE~a| [...] , |NINDA2xNE~a| X X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 471. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006090) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.