Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 084
About this tablet
Four small fragments of a clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), among the oldest written documents on earth, now in Cornell University's cuneiform collection. It is an accounting record: quantities of grain, written with the round and wedge-shaped numerical impressions of the archaic grain-capacity system, set beside entries that include the term Šubur and a sign later read as 'tablet' or 'register.' Too little survives to say what institution kept the account or who received the grain, but the format — number, then commodity, then person or category — is the ancestor of every ledger written since.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is part of a grain ledger. One entry records 8 large measures charged to (or checked off for) Šubur; another logs 1 unit of a smaller capacity measure, then a case marked with the 'register' sign, then another single unit, then 2 large measures. The final readable case pairs 2 units of yet another measure with barley and the register sign again. Everything before, between, and after these entries is broken away, and the back of the tablet preserves nothing at all.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, column i) [...] , [...] 8(N14) , PAP~a Šubur 1(N45) , [...] [...] , DUB~a 1(N45) , [...] 2(N14) , [...] [...] 2(N34) , [...] barley (ŠE~a), DUB~a [...] (Remaining cases and the reverse are broken away; no further text is preserved on the surviving fragments.)
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
[...] , [...] 8(N14)# , PAP~a SZUBUR 1(N45) , [...] [...] , DUB~a 1(N45) , [...] 2(N14) , [...] [...] 2(N34) , [...] SZE~a DUB~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 084. 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 (P328732) — 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.