Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 026
About this tablet
A proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), among the very oldest written documents in existence — older than any connected sentence ever written. It records quantities of goods or animals tallied against institutional locations: a courtyard, a storehouse, a livestock pen. The scribe pressed round and wedge-shaped number marks into the clay beside pictographic signs; this is bookkeeping from the world's first bureaucracy, written before writing could yet record speech.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a broken ledger. The first entries have lost their numbers, but the categories survive: something counted for the courtyard, something for the storehouse under the label 'mixed', then a lost entry, then three units marked with the AN sign. The reverse carries the legible totals: ten units for the livestock pen plus five smaller units; ten units of GA (perhaps a dairy or container item — the next sign is illegible); fifty units filed under DA-GUL; and twenty units assigned to 'the Land'. What exactly was being counted — animals, jars, rations — the tablet no longer tells us.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, column of entries; beginnings broken) [...] : [...] [...] : courtyard (KISAL) [...] : storehouse-container, 'mixed' (GA₂×HI) [...] : [...] [...] : 3 (N57 units), AN (reverse) 1 (N14, = 10 units) : livestock pen (TUR₃), 5 (N57 units) 1 (N14, = 10 units) : GA, ... (sign illegible) 5 (N14, = 50 units)⸢?⸣ : DA, GUL 2 (N14, = 20 units)⸢?⸣ : the Land (KALAM)
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
[...] , [...] [...] , KISAL~b1 [...] , |GA2~a1xHI| [...] , [...] [...] , 3(N57) AN 1(N14) , TUR3~a 5(N57) 1(N14) , GA~a X 5(N14)# , DA~a GUL 2(N14)# , KALAM~g
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 026. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA (P328728) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.
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.