Position in chronology
MS 2501
About this tablet
A small clay account tablet from the very dawn of writing in southern Mesopotamia, around 3300–3000 BCE, when scribes were still using picture-signs and impressed number-marks rather than fully formed cuneiform. Each ruled box holds a quantity followed by one or two signs naming the goods or the person responsible; the tablet closes twice with the same phrase involving a temple-administrator (SANGA), which suggests entries booked under one office. Many of the signs are still not securely readable today — proto-cuneiform records amounts reliably but names its commodities in a vocabulary we have only partly recovered. It is bookkeeping, not literature: one of the ledger-slips that writing was invented to produce.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The front of the tablet lists small deliveries: eight units of one item, a figure in the tens plus two more of another, and single units of a third, each tagged with the name of a good or a handler. One line carries no surviving number and ends with what looks like an accounting heading tied to a temple administrator. The back continues with larger totals — seventy-six units in one entry, three hundred and sixty in another — then drops back to twos and ones for several further commodities, and closes by repeating that same administrator's heading. Breaks have taken the edges of several lines, and the last entries are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 8 (units N01) — UR~a(?) GIŠ3~b 1 (ten, N14) [...] 2 (units N01) — DUR~b ZATU819 [...] 1 (unit N01) — GIR3~c BU~a DU A (no numeral preserved) — TE RAD~a SANGA~a [...] [...] — [...] (reverse) 1 (sixty, N34) 1 (ten, N14) 6 (units N01) [...] — [...] 6 (sixties, N34) — NE~a NUNUZ~a2 2 (units N01) — ZATU831@g 1 (unit N01) — AGAR2 1 (unit N01) — TUN3~a [...] — [...] (no numeral preserved) — TE RAD~a SANGA~a x [...]
Our translation engine — Opus 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(N01)# , UR~a? GISZ3~b 1(N14) [...] 2(N01) , DUR~b# ZATU819# [...] 1(N01)# , GIR3~c BU~a DU A , TE RAD~a SANGA~a# [...] [...] , [...] 1(N34)# 1(N14)# 6(N01)# [...] , [...] 6(N34) , NE~a NUNUZ~a2 2(N01) , ZATU831@g 1(N01) , AGAR2 1(N01) , TUN3~a [...] , [...] , TE RAD~a SANGA~a X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2501. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006068) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.