Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 037
About this tablet
This is a very small clay tablet from the dawn of writing itself — the Uruk period of southern Mesopotamia, roughly 3300–3000 BCE, before written signs recorded language in sentences. An anonymous accountant pressed numbers into the clay with a round stylus and paired each number with a commodity sign, then closed the account with a grand total. The individual entries — including what is probably salt, and a repeated sign group written inside the 'sun/day' sign — cannot be securely translated, because the vocabulary of proto-cuneiform is still only partly deciphered. The tablet has no excavated findspot; it belongs to the Cornell (Rosen) collection and was published in the CUSAS series.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
It is a short ledger. The first entry, with its commodity name broken away, records 8 units (with a larger unit probably preceding it). Then come 5 units of one item, 2 of a second, 6 of a third — three related goods written with the 'day/sun' sign marked with one, two and three strokes. Next: 2 units of the DUB commodity, 1 large unit of salt, 6 units of something now lost, and 3 more of the one-stroke item. The account closes with a total: 5 large units and 2 small ones. The back of the tablet is broken and worn away, with only a sign or two still visible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [1(N15)] 8(N02) — [commodity lost] 2. 5(N02) — (of) |U4×3(N57)| 3. 2(N02) — (of) |U4×2(N57)| 4. 6(N02) — (of) |U4×1(N57)| 5. 2(N02) — DUB~b (tablet/record-unit) 6. 1(N15) — MUN~a1 (salt) 7. 6(N02) — [commodity lost] 8. 3(N02) — (of) |U4×1(N57)| Summary (final case) 9. 5(N15) 2(N02) — KISZ, PAP~a (total) Reverse: surface broken and abraded; traces of one or two signs at the top (consistent with KISZ / PAP~a), the remainder illegible.
Our translation engine — Opus 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
[1(N15)] 8(N02)# , [...] 5(N02) , |U4x3(N57)| 2(N02) , |U4x2(N57)| 6(N02)# , |U4x1(N57)| 2(N02) , DUB~b 1(N15) , MUN~a1 6(N02)# , [...] 3(N02) , |U4x1(N57)| 5(N15)# 2(N02)# , KISZ PAP~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 037. 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 (P325492) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.