Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 112
About this tablet
This is a small clay accounting tablet from the very dawn of writing in southern Mesopotamia — the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE — now broken into fragments and held at Cornell University. Its signs are proto-cuneiform: round and oblique impressions made with the end of a stylus for numbers, and simple pictograms for goods such as grain and beer. What survives records measured quantities of barley and what appears to be beer, each amount paired with the commodity it counts. It is bookkeeping from before literature, before grammar was even written down — a ledger line from one of the first administrative systems on earth.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The readable entries amount to a short inventory: something over two large units of beer (with a container or enclosure noted alongside it), two more measures of barley, and two further quantities — one written with a combination of large and small number signs, the other paired with a commodity sign we can no longer identify. Several lines above and below these are broken away, and the commodity names for at least two entries are lost entirely. The reverse carries more numbers and sign groups, but too little survives to read them as connected entries.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] 2 (N34) — [...] beer, LAGAB~b (container/enclosure) [...] — (unidentified sign) [...] N (numeral) — (unidentified sign) 2 (N14) — barley 1 (N18) 1 (N03) — (commodity lost) 1 (N14) 1 (N01) — (unidentified sign) HI@g~a [...] — [...] (blank/broken) — [...] (The remainder of the surface, including the reverse, is broken or too eroded to yield a continuous reading; the transliteration ends here.)
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(N34) , [...] KASZ~a LAGAB~b [...] , X [...] N , X 2(N14) , SZE~a 1(N18) 1(N03) , 1(N14) 1(N01) , X HI@g~a [...] , [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 112. 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 (P283919) — 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.