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.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
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. 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 (P325223) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.