Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 101
About this tablet
A small, badly worn clay tablet from the very beginning of writing — the Uruk period of southern Mesopotamia, around 3300–3000 BCE — now in the Cornell collection. It is an accounting record: a column of quantities written with the round and wedge-shaped number signs of proto-cuneiform, with the single surviving readable entry noting seven large units of barley issued as rations or fodder. Nothing else survives well enough to tell us who the recipients were or which institution kept the books. Texts like this are the oldest bookkeeping on earth, written before anyone had yet written a sentence.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged ledger. Only one line can still be read in full: seven large measures of barley, entered as consumed — food rations or animal fodder. The other entries preserve nothing but their figures — four, five, and two of the same large unit, then four, one, and one of smaller units — with the commodity names and the names of the people or departments they belonged to lost to breakage and wear. The rest of the tablet, including the back, is unreadable.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, columns/cases — mostly broken) [...] , [...] 7(N14) , barley — consumed (rations) [...] , [...] [...] 4(N14) , [...] [...] 5(N14) , [...] [...] 2(N14) , [...] [...] , [...] [...] 4(N01) , [...] [...] 1(N04)(?) , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)(?) , [...] [...] , [...] (No further legible text; the remaining cases and the reverse are effaced or broken away.)
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
[...] , [...] 7(N14) , SZE~a GU7 [...] , [...] [...] 4(N14) , [...] [...] 5(N14) , [...] [...] 2(N14) , [...] [...] , [...] [...] 4(N01) , [...] [...] 1(N04)# , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 101. 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 (P328737) — 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.