Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 061
About this tablet
A fragment of one of the world's oldest written documents: a proto-cuneiform administrative account from the Uruk period, around 3300–3000 BCE, before writing could record full sentences. The surviving entries count single units — apparently a she-goat, a storehouse item, and rations or flour — tagged with signs marking officials or storage categories. It is not literature but bookkeeping, the practical accounting technology out of which writing itself was born.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a page from a very early ledger, mostly broken away. What survives are a few one-unit entries: something involving a she-goat and a storehouse marked as delivered; one item recorded as given or deposited; one entry in a 'small' category; one linked to an official or class called NAMEŠDA; and one unit of flour or rations assigned to a storage bin. The lines before and after each of these are lost, and the back of the tablet is too eroded to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] she-goat(?), storehouse [...] delivered. 1 given/deposited [...] [...] , [...] 1 — small (category?), BU. 1 — AN, the NAMEŠDA (official/class). 1 — UB (storage bin?), flour/ration. [...] , [...] [...] , [...] (remainder broken; reverse uninscribed or eroded)
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
[...] UD5~a# GA2~a1# X DU 1(N01) RU [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01) , TUR BU~a 1(N01) , AN NAMESZDA 1(N01) , UB ZI~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 061. 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 (P325490) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.
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.