Position in chronology
MS 2396
About this tablet
This small clay tablet comes from the Uruk period (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), the very dawn of writing in southern Mesopotamia, when scribes were still using pictographic signs pressed and incised into clay rather than the fully cuneiform wedges of later centuries. It appears to be an administrative tally: a list of one unit each of several different commodities — beer or barley, a possible place-reference to Uruk itself, sheep and a donkey, fish, and what may be a courtyard or ritual item — followed by a summary line totaling nine units as 'disbursed.' Such lists are among the very first bureaucratic records humans ever produced, tracking the movement of goods (rations, offerings, or temple supplies) through an early city administration. Several of the individual signs (marked ZATU659, ZATU773) remain unidentified by modern scholarship, a reminder of how much of this earliest writing system is still being deciphered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is an old inventory or delivery slip. It lists, one line at a time, a single unit of each of several different goods — a portion of beer or barley, an item whose sign we can't yet identify, something connected with the city of Uruk, an offering or item associated with a lord or official along with reeds, a donkey and a sheep, fish, and something involving a horn and a courtyard — plus a line that just says 'overseer' and one that says 'disbursed.' After a blank line, the tablet totals things up: nine units have been disbursed or handed over, tallied by an overseer, with a final notation referring to a field — though that last sign is partly broken away. In short, it's a bookkeeping record of small quantities of assorted goods moving through an early administrative office.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (unit): beer — barley(-barley) [KAŠ, doubled ŠE-sign] 1 (unit): ZATU659 (commodity sign, reading not established) 1 (unit): Uruk (the place) — ZATU773 1 (unit): the lord/EN — reed(s) [doubled GI-sign] 1 (unit): donkey — sheep 1 (unit): mouth — fish 1 (unit): horn — courtyard 1 (unit): PAP (overseer/total-marker) PA (overseer/branch-marker) BA (disbursed) (blank/uninscribed line) 9 (units): disbursed — received/collected — total GAN (field) [sign partly broken]
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
1(N01) , KASZ~c |SZE~a&SZE~a| 1(N01) , ZATU659 1(N01) , UNUG~a KI ZATU773~a 1(N01) , EN~a |GI&GI| 1(N01) , ANSZE~e UDU~a 1(N01) , KA~a KU6~a 1(N01) , SI KISAL~b1 1(N01) , PAP~a 1(N01) , PA~a , BA , 9(N01) , BA SU~a PAP~a , GAN~a#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2396. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006037) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.