Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 136
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tablet from the Uruk period, one of the earliest phases of writing anywhere in the world, recording quantities of some commodity — possibly a lion-related product such as skins — that were disbursed or allotted to someone. The tablet survives only in scattered, badly broken fragments, so most of its original entries (probably naming officials, goods, or institutions) are lost. What remains are a few numeral notations and two or three legible signs, enough to show it was a bookkeeping record rather than a literary or royal text. Tablets like this are important precisely because they are mundane: they show the accounting apparatus that literacy itself grew up to serve, thousands of years before contracts, letters, or literature.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a warehouse or ration ledger, though most of it is broken away. The surviving lines just give bare numbers — quantities like '1 and 4', later '2 and 1' — next to a couple of goods or notations. One entry seems to record a lion or lion-skin item that was handed out or issued; another simply notes something 'mixed' or of a certain quality. Everything else — who received the goods, from where, and why — is lost in the missing pieces of clay.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (N01), 4 (N39~a) — [......] [......] — [......] [......] — [......] [......] — [......] 2 (N42~a), 1 (N25) — lion(-skin)(?), disbursed 1 (N01) — mixed/HI [......] — [......]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(N01) 4(N39~a) , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N42~a) 1(N25) , PIRIG~b1# BA 1(N01) , HI [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 136. 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 (P325760) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.