Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 092
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), written in proto-cuneiform — the earliest stage of writing, before it recorded any spoken language. It is an account: quantities entered with round and punched number-signs are set beside commodity signs, chiefly barley, along with a wooden item and one or two further entries now broken away. Tablets like this one, in the Cornell collection with no recorded findspot, are the routine bookkeeping of the first cities in southern Iraq — the paperwork out of which writing itself was invented.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The readable part of this fragment is a short list of amounts and goods. One entry is lost, leaving only a wooden item or timber. Next comes a measured quantity of barley — one large unit, three medium, one small — booked together with a container-mark, a horn(?), a delivery note, and a further qualifier. Then a smaller barley figure, two medium units and two small. A fourth line carries numbers but no surviving commodity, and the last line is broken away entirely. The reverse is worn smooth and unreadable.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse (?) [...] — GIŠ₃~a (timber/wooden item) 1(N19) 3(N14) 1(N01) — |LAGAB~b.TE|, barley, SI (horn), delivered, SI4~f 2(N14) 2(N01) — barley 1(N19) 5(N04) — [no entry preserved] [...] — [...] (Remainder broken; the opposite face is entirely eroded and preserves no legible signs.)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] , GISZ3~a 1(N19) 3(N14)# 1(N01) , |LAGAB~b.TE| SZE~a SI DU SI4~f 2(N14) 2(N01) , SZE~a 1(N19) 5(N04)# , [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 092. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA (P325223) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.