Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 097
About this tablet
One of the world's oldest written documents: a small clay accounting tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), now reassembled from two joining fragments in Cornell's collection. A temple or estate bookkeeper impressed numerals with the round end of a stylus and drew commodity signs beside them — entries involving a cattle-pen, sheep, fish, and plant fodder, with a lord or institutional head named among the parties. Writing at this stage records only quantities and things, not sentences: there is no grammar here, and several signs still have no agreed meaning.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is a short ledger. The first entry records one unit of something combustible or processed, its commodity sign now broken. Then two large measures plus one smaller one charged to the cattle-pen, followed by a damaged line, one measure against an unidentified commodity, and one measure connected with sheep. The reverse continues in the same style: a broken entry involving a lord, another too damaged to read beyond a hand-sign, three units of one commodity, and a final entry pairing fodder with fish. Both halves are cracked and partly effaced, so the totals and the names of the parties are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1 (N01) — [...] NE~a (fire/fuel) 2 (N42~a), 1 (N25) — TUR3~a (cattle-pen) ME~a [...] — [...] (illegible sign) 1 (N42~a) — ZATU729(?) 1 (N42~a) — LU2, AMA~a, UDU~a (sheep) Reverse [...] — [...] EN~a (lord/institutional head) [...] — [...] ŠU, UR5~a 3 (N41) — TAR~a [...] 1 (N20)(?) — U2~b (fodder/plant material), KU6~a (fish)
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
1(N01) , [X] NE~a 2(N42~a) 1(N25) , TUR3~a ME~a [...] , X [...] 1(N42~a) , ZATU729? 1(N42~a) , LU2 AMA~a UDU~a [...] , [...] EN~a [...] , X SZU# UR5~a 3(N41) , TAR~a [...] 1(N20)#? , U2~b KU6~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 097. 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 (P283916) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.