MSVO 1, 205

~3100 BCE·Uruk Period·P005272

About this tablet

This is a small proto-cuneiform tablet from the Uruk/Jemdet Nasr period found at Kish, one of the earliest phases of writing anywhere in the world (roughly 3200–3000 BCE). It is a bookkeeping record — a scribe pressing numeral impressions and simple pictographs into wet clay to track small livestock (goats, sheep) and goods like cloth, likely tallying disbursements or holdings assigned to storage bins. Tablets like this are not literature or law but the raw accounting substrate from which writing itself grew, recording who had how many animals or bolts of cloth in a temple or household economy.

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

Written in modern English

The tablet lists a short series of counted items: one entry marked with a foot- or dagger-shaped sign, followed by damage; one young goat assigned to a storage bin; another young goat linked to two uncertain signs; one piece of cloth assigned to a bin; six sheep; and one more piece of cloth, with the entry cut off by damage. In short, it's a tally sheet — a handful of small livestock and cloth items being counted and sorted into storage categories, with the beginning and end of a couple of lines lost to breakage.

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

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

1 (unit): GIR3 (foot/dagger-sign, variant “g~b”) — ...[broken] 1 (unit): MASZ2 (kid/goat) — AN UB (storage bin, with celestial/divine marker) 1 (unit): MASZ2 (kid/goat) — SZIR(?) NIM(?) 1 (unit): TUG2(?) (cloth) — UB (storage bin) 6 (units): UDU (sheep) 1 (unit): TUG2(?) (cloth) — [...broken]

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

Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.

Transliteration

1(N01)# , GIR3@g~b# X [...]
1(N01) , MASZ2 AN UB
1(N01) , MASZ2 SZIR~a? NIM~b1
1(N01) , TUG2~a#? UB#
6(N01) , UDU~a
1(N01) , TUG2~a? [...]

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 1, 205. 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: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P005272) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).

Related tablets

Related sources

~3200 BCE

Proto-Cuneiform Account Tablet (VAT 15211)

An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.

~2050 BCE

Umma Livestock and Personnel Account (AnOr 1, 243)

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.

~3300 BCE

AoF 30, 238,1