Position in chronology
MS 2497
About this tablet
This is a small clay accounting tablet from the Uruk period, among the very earliest writing in human history (roughly 3200 BCE), recording distributions of barley to several distinct groups or officials — dependent workers or people from the Subir region, a category linked to fish or fishermen, a temple administrator (the sanga), and a couple of terms whose exact meaning is now lost to us. The tablet ends with running subtotals and a grand total, showing that even at the dawn of writing, scribes were already keeping careful, itemized ledgers of grain moving through an institution's stores. It is not a story or a letter but the plainest kind of bookkeeping: who got how much barley, tallied and checked.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This looks like a grain-disbursement ledger. It lists barley handed out to different groups: some workers or people associated with Subir, a group connected with fish or fishing, an administrator called the sanga, and a couple of other categories whose names don't translate cleanly into anything we recognize today. There's also a line that seems to head a separate account of barley for 'the city.' The tablet then gives running subtotals of barley (and one subtotal of an unclear commodity) before closing with a grand total. In short: a temple or institution's clerk tallying up grain issued to various recipients, with the math checked and totaled at the bottom — the world's oldest known form of paperwork.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 8 (units): barley — (for) the Šubur (dependent workers / people of Subir) 7 (units) + 4 (units): barley — ZAG-KU6 ("fish-flank"; fish-related recipients / fishermen) 3 (units): barley — (for) the sanga (institutional administrator) 5 (units): barley — ZATU773, MAŠ 5 (units): barley — HI, U4 : City (URU) — barley (heading for an urban barley entry) 1(N34) + 7 + 4 (units): barley (subtotal) 1(N46) + 4(N19) (units): (subtotal, commodity unspecified) 1(N34) + 2(N45) + 1 + 4 (units): barley (grand total)
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
8(N14) , SZE~a SZUBUR 7(N14) 4(N01) , SZE~a ZAG~a KU6~a 3(N14) , SZE~a SANGA~a 5(N14) , SZE~a ZATU773~b MASZ 5(N14) , SZE~a HI U4 , URU~a1 SZE~a 1(N34) 7(N14) 4(N01) , SZE~a 1(N46) 4(N19) , 1(N34) 2(N45) 1(N14) 4(N01) , SZE~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2497. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006064) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.