Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 137
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the very early Uruk period (roughly 3300–3100 BCE), one of the world's oldest forms of writing, before cuneiform script had fully matured into wedge-shaped signs. It is a bookkeeping record — a scribe tallying small quantities of a foodstuff (rendered here as GUG2, possibly a grain product) alongside references to 'the city' as an institution, entries of goods 'returned,' 'consumed,' and 'exchanged.' Tablets like this come from the earliest bureaucracies of Mesopotamian city-states, where temple or palace administrators tracked rations, deliveries, and disbursements using numeral signs and pictographs rather than full sentences.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This looks like an old ledger page, mostly a list of small quantities of a foodstuff issued or logged under different headings. Some entries note a quantity of a processed grain product; others reference goods tied to 'the city' — some marked as returned, others as consumed, and a final couple of lines record a purchase or exchange transaction, also consumed. Much of the tablet is broken, so several line items and their quantities are missing, but the overall shape is that of a routine institutional tally sheet, not unlike a modern inventory log with partial entries lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N51) [...] 1(N28): NE~a-GUG2 (processed GUG2-foodstuff) X: [...] 1(N14): [...] 1(N28): NE~a-GUG2 1(N14): [...] GUG2 of the city 2(N39~a): cattle-stall(?) BULUG3-goods of the city, returned [...] 1(N03) [...]: [...] [x] of the city, consumed City purchase/exchange: cattle-stall(?), day 1, consumed, BULUG3-goods Purchase/exchange, consumed
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(N51) [...] 1(N28)# , NE~a# GUG2 X , [...] 1(N14) , [...] 1(N28) , NE~a GUG2 1(N14) , [...] GUG2 URU~a1 2(N39~a) , AB~a BULUG3 URU~a1 GI4~a [...] 1(N03) [...] , [...] X URU~a1 GU7 URU~a1 SZAM2 AB~a# |U4x1(N01)| GU7 BULUG3 SZAM2# GU7
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 137. 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 (P325063) — 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.