Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 064
About this tablet
One of the oldest kinds of document humans ever produced: a proto-cuneiform account from the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), before writing could record full sentences. An anonymous administrator tallied she-goats, young goats, and wool in numbered batches — 25 here, 20 there, with a grand figure of 187 — sorting them under category marks whose exact meaning is now lost. It is bookkeeping from the very dawn of writing, when the script existed almost entirely to count animals and goods for large institutional households.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a herd-and-wool ledger. The first entry is lost, then the accountant logs 25 she-goats under the BAR category, followed by a section heading whose meaning we no longer know. After another lost entry come the young animals: some thirty-odd kids counted with their wool, then another 20 kids, also a BAR portion with wool. Two classifying marks close the section, and a large figure — 187 — stands at the end, almost certainly the running total, though the rest of that line is broken. The back of the tablet is too worn to read anything.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] , [...] 25 (2×10 + 5) she-goats, BAR (disbursement portion) ZATU773 (category heading; commodity unidentified) [...] , [...] 30 [+ ...] + 1 kids, wool 20 kids, BAR (portion), wool DA PA (classifying marks) 187 (3×60 + 7)# , [...] (probably a total; entry 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
[...] , [...] 2(N14) 5(N01) , UD5~a BAR ZATU773~a [...] , [...] 3(N14) [...] 1(N01) , MASZ2 SIG2~b 2(N14) , MASZ BAR SIG2~b DA~a PA~a 3(N34)# 7(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 064. 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 (P325228) — 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.