Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 062
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from the Uruk period — the very dawn of writing, around 3300–3000 BCE — recording quantities of fish: carp counted in two varieties, a large tally of 94 fish, and 50 units of another product. The reverse names officials or institutions and ends with the sign for the city of Uruk itself, the great southern Mesopotamian metropolis where writing was invented. It is a snapshot of the fishing economy that fed one of humanity's first cities, drawn up by an anonymous administrator using numbers pressed into clay with a round stylus.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fish ledger. The readable entries count carp — one batch of at least four with a further qualifier, another batch of eight of a second variety — then a big total of 94 fish, and 50 units of some other product whose sign we can no longer identify. A line mentions a settlement, but the rest of that side is broken away. The back of the tablet lists what look like the responsible parties or institutions: a compound place-or-office sign, the sign GIR3, and one sign that has never been deciphered. After two more lost lines and two illegible signs, the document closes with the name of the city of Uruk — presumably where these fish were delivered or accounted for.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] 4 (units); 4 ... carp (SUHUR) 8 (units): carp (variant sign, SUHUR@t) 94 (1×60 + 3×10 + 4): fish (KU6) 50 (5×10): ... (SUKUD-doubled sign, an unidentified commodity or fish category) [...]: settlement (URU) [... broken entry ...] (reverse) BU+DU6 (compound sign — an institution, place, or official) GIR3 ZATU714 (undeciphered sign) [... broken entry ...] [... broken entry ...] (two illegible signs) Uruk (UNUG)
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) , 4(N57) SUHUR 8(N01) , SUHUR@t 1(N34) 3(N14)# 4(N01) , KU6~a 5(N14) , |(SUKUD+SUKUD)~b| [...] , URU~a1 [...] , [...] |BU~a+DU6~a| GIR3~a ZATU714 [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X X UNUG~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 062. 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 (P325739) — 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.