Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 109
About this tablet
A proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period, roughly 3200–3000 BCE, recording quantities of goods being disbursed from or allocated to an institutional storehouse. Each surviving entry pairs a numerical measure with the signs for 'storehouse' and 'disbursement' — the most basic grammar of early bureaucratic accounting. The tablet is badly broken: the header line that would have named the commodity (grain, oil, or another staple) is lost entirely, and three middle entries survive only as fragments. This is the earliest known form of writing in action, not literature but ledger-keeping, produced by an anonymous administrator at a large temple or civic institution somewhere in ancient Iraq.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this ledger records a handful of storehouse disbursements. One entry tallies one large measure, one medium measure, and one small measure of goods — all released from the storehouse. A second entry records five small measures and two further units, again from the storehouse. Three lines in between are too broken to read. The final surviving entry shows one large measure and six small measures, once more marked as disbursed from the storehouse. What these measures held — grain, oil, or something else — cannot be determined, because the top of the tablet that would have stated the commodity is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] — [...] [sign: unidentified] [...] 1 large measure (partially preserved) + 1 medium measure + 1 small measure — storehouse — disbursed 5 small measures + 2 units — storehouse [...] — [...] [...] — [...] [...] — [...] 1 large measure + 6 small measures — disbursed — storehouse
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X [...] 1(N46)# 1(N14) 1(N57) , E2~a BA 5(N19) 2(N57) , E2~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N46) 6(N19) , BA E2~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 109. 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 (P328729) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.