Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 107
About this tablet
A small clay fragment from the very dawn of writing — a proto-cuneiform account of the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), now at Cornell University. Even in ruin it shows the essential machinery of the world's first bookkeeping: ruled boxes, each holding a number followed by the thing counted. The surviving entries pair grain-type quantities with a fish sign, an 'assembly' sign, and what appears to be the name of the city Uruk itself. It is not a sentence but a ledger — the kind of tally that made cities administrable before anyone had yet written a word of literature.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The top of the tablet is gone. What survives is a set of ruled boxes, each with an amount and a heading. One box records a quantity of 2 (large circular units) charged against a heading that includes 'fine/female' and 'mixed.' The next records 3 (grain units) under PAP and Uruk. A third lists 1 + 1 units for the assembly, NA, and fish. A fourth repeats the earlier heading with 2 units. The final box, and the whole reverse, are lost to breakage and erosion.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse (proto-cuneiform, case-ruled) case 1: [...] — [...] case 2: [...] 2(N14) — TA, fine(?)/female, mixed(?) case 3: [...] 3(N19) — PAP, Uruk case 4: 1(N04) 1(N41) — assembly (UKKIN), NA, fish (KU6) case 5: 2(N41) — TA, fine(?)/female, mixed(?) case 6: [...] — [...] (Reverse: no legible inscription preserved; surface eroded and 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
[...] , [...] [...] 2(N14) , TA~c SAL HI [...] 3(N19) , PAP~a# UNUG~a 1(N04) 1(N41) , UKKIN~a NA~a KU6~a 2(N41) , TA~c SAL HI [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 107. 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 (P325758) — 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.