Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 144
About this tablet
A fragment of one of humanity's earliest accounting documents, from the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), when writing itself was being invented in southern Mesopotamia. The surviving entries record quantities of barley — impressed numeral signs beside the pictograph for grain — assigned to persons or offices whose designations include signs we still cannot read. The tablet is too broken to reconstruct the transaction, but it belongs to the bookkeeping of a large institution managing grain stores some five thousand years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a barley ledger, now shattered. One readable entry logs about twenty measures of barley; another logs ten of some commodity now lost. A third entry records three units against a person or office written with signs meaning something like 'mixed' and 'ration' — probably a title or name we can no longer decipher. Another line held a further twenty-odd measures. Everything else — who received the grain, from whom, and why — has broken away, and the back of the tablet carries no writing.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse; all lines fragmentary) [...] 2 N14 (= 20, or 12 in the grain-capacity system) [...] — barley (ŠE) [...] 1 N14 (= 10, or 6) [...] — [...] [...] — (one illegible sign) [...] — [...] 3 N01 (= 3 units) — HI ("mixed"?) (and) GAR ("ration/deposited"), with the compound signs ZATU714×HI and ZATU651×GAR (unread designation, likely an official's title or name) [...] — [...] [...] 2 N14 (= 20, or 12) [...] [...] — [...] (Remainder of obverse lost; reverse uninscribed or effaced)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] 2(N14) [...] , SZE~a [...] 1(N14) [...] , [...] [...] , X [...] , [...] 3(N01) , HI@g~a GAR |ZATU714xHI@g~a| |ZATU651xGAR| [...] , [...] [...] 2(N14) [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 144. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA (P325229) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.