Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 133
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tablet from the Uruk period, among the very earliest writing in Mesopotamia, roughly 3200 BCE. It appears to be an accounting record — likely a warehouse or storehouse inventory — tallying small quantities of goods, including grain and possibly fish, tied to institutional categories like a storage bin or cattle-stall. The tablet is badly worn, so most entries survive only as fragments of numbers and commodity signs, but it gives us a glimpse of the earliest bureaucratic bookkeeping, when accountants first began writing down quantities of grain, seed, and fish allotted to different parts of an institution.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a battered old ledger page. Most of it has crumbled away, but you can still make out a few tallies: a quantity of four of something, then two more entries too worn to read, followed by a mention of a storehouse or bin, and possibly some seed-grain. Further down, single units of a 'mixed' item and what looks like barley are recorded. The last complete line reads like a summary: a fish-measure (carp) attributed to a cattle-stall or storage division of some institution. In short — a fragmentary inventory of grain, seed, and fish rationed out or stored in a warehouse-like setting, the everyday bookkeeping of a very early bureaucracy.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 4 (units), [...] [...] , (2 illegible signs) [...] , [...] storehouse, bin(?) [...] , [...] seed(-grain)? 1 (unit) , [...] 1 (unit) , mixed(?) 1 (unit) , barley? carp(-measure): cattle-stall/institutional category
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] 4(N01)# , [...] [...] , X X [...] , [...] E2~a UB [...] , X NUMUN#? 1(N01) , X 1(N24) , HI@g~a# 1(N39~a) , SZE~a#? SUHUR AB~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 133. 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 (P325451) — 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.