MS 3153

~3100 BCE·Uruk Period·P252164

About this tablet

This is a small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), one of the earliest forms of writing in human history — a stage before true sentences, when scribes recorded quantities of goods or people using impressed numerals alongside a handful of pictographic sign-groups. The tablet is divided into cases (five in total, two on the obverse and three on the reverse), each pairing a numeral notation with a short label such as KISZ, SAL ('woman'/female personnel), EN ('lord' or high official), or ERIM ('workers'). It likely comes from an institutional household — a temple or palace economy — tallying commodities, rations, or labor gangs under different categories or overseers, but because the sign values themselves (KISZ, KUR, EN, ERIM, SAL) are still debated for this earliest phase of writing, its precise subject cannot be pinned down with certainty.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

This tablet is a bookkeeping tally, not a story or letter. Five separate entries record counts of something — probably goods, rations, or people — each counted with the number-signs of the accounting system and sorted into named groups. One entry is tagged 'KUR-KISZ,' another 'KISZ, women,' a third under a 'lord' or high official, a fourth under 'male workers,' and a last one simply 'KISZ' again. In short: a running list, case by case, of quantities assigned to or drawn from different categories of people or supplies in an early institutional household — the kind of internal accounting record kept by a large estate or temple, though the exact commodities being counted are lost to us today.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

Obverse: Case 1: 2(N34) 5(N14) [numerical notation] — KUR~a KISZ Case 2: 3(N34) 2(N14) 3(N01) [numerical notation] — KISZ SAL Reverse: Case 3: 5(N34) 2(N14) 1(N01) [numerical notation] — EN~a Case 4: 5(N14) 2(N01) [numerical notation] — ERIM~a Case 5: 6(N34) 1(N14) 3(N01) [numerical notation] — KISZ

Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.

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Transliteration

2(N34) 5(N14) , KUR~a KISZ
3(N34) 2(N14) 3(N01) , KISZ SAL
5(N34) 2(N14) 1(N01) , EN~a
5(N14) 2(N01) , ERIM~a
6(N34) 1(N14) 3(N01) , KISZ

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC) ?) — MS 3153. 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: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252164) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).

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