Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 138
About this tablet
This is a fragmentary administrative tablet from the Uruk period, one of the earliest forms of writing in human history, roughly 3200 BCE. It is not a story or letter but a bookkeeping record — a list of containers, vessels, quantities of goods (perhaps beer, bread, and fish), and possibly people or personnel, tallied with numeral signs. Such tablets were the working paperwork of a large temple or palace household, tracking the movement and disbursement of commodities long before writing was used for anything but accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This looks like an old inventory sheet. It lists several kinds of containers and jars in small counts — one entry of fourteen units of a compound container-sign, two large vessels, two cauldrons, one jar — followed by what seems to be a beer or storage-heap entry, then a tally of five (plus one) 'heads,' possibly people or recipients being counted or rationed. Further down, two units of bread or rations are noted, and the tablet ends with a badly damaged line mentioning something disbursed ('BA') and, at the very bottom, a reference to fish, though the surrounding words are lost. Altogether it reads like a scribe's running tally of goods — vessels, beer, bread, personnel, fish — moving in or out of some institution's stores, but too broken to reconstruct the full transaction.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N14) unit(s): [LAGAB׊A] [LAGAB׊ITA] (a container/implement type) 2(N01) unit(s): [DUG variant vessel] 2(N01) unit(s): SZEN-vessel (cauldron/pot) 1(N01) unit: DUG-vessel (jar) 1(N01) 1(N26) unit(s): DU6 (storage-heap/beer-mound entry) 5(N01) 1(N29a) unit(s): SAG (person/head-count or recipient) 2(N01) unit(s) [...]: GAR (bread/ration allotment) [...] AN — BA (disbursed) [...] KU6 (fish) [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(N14) , |LAGAB~axSZA|# |LAGAB~axSZITA~a1| 2(N01) , |DUG~cx1(N58)| 2(N01) , SZEN~a# 1(N01) , DUG~a# 1(N01)# 1(N26) , DU6~a 5(N01)# 1(N29~a)# , SAG 2(N01)# [...] , GAR# X? AN# BA [...] , KU6~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 138. 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 (P325195) — 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.