Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 130
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the very earliest phases of writing, found broken into several fragments. It records quantities of goods using the proto-cuneiform numeral system — round and wedge-shaped impressions counting discrete items, capacities, or other measures — alongside commodity signs whose exact meanings (a container or 'boat' sign, a 'mixed' qualifier, a fire- or fuel-related sign) are still debated by scholars. It belongs to the vast body of bookkeeping records that the earliest cities produced to track grain, animals, or goods moving through a temple or palace household, though the specific transaction it documents cannot be recovered from what survives.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken accounting tablet lists a series of quantities next to commodity notations, but almost every line is missing its beginning, so we cannot say what person, place, or institution the entries belonged to. Line by line it reads roughly: one unit of something paired with a 'mixed' commodity and a fire- or fuel-related good; four separate single units together with one more unit of the same mixed commodity; one unit paired with a boat- or container-type item; and finally one unit followed by two units of another commodity. It is the kind of terse tally-sheet scribes kept for goods passing through a household or storehouse, but too little of the tablet survives to reconstruct the full transaction.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] 1 (unit) , mixed(?)-commodity 1 (unit) — NE~a [fire/fuel(?) commodity] [...] 1 (unit) 1 (unit) 1 (unit) 1 (unit) , 1 (unit) — mixed(?)-commodity [...] 1 (unit) , MAR~a [boat/container(?) commodity] [...] 1 (unit) 2 (units) [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] 1(N14) , |HIx1(N57)|# NE~a [...] 1(N42~a) 1(N25) 1(N28~c) 1(N30~a) , 1(N57) HI@g~a [...] 1(N28) , MAR~a [...] 1(N05) 2(N42~a) [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 130. 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 (P325240) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (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.