Position in chronology
MS 2504
About this tablet
This is a tiny proto-cuneiform tablet from Uruk-period Umma (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), among the very earliest writing anywhere. It is not a sentence but a set of tallied entries — numeral notations paired with the sheep sign (UDU) and other pictographic markers — recording counts of small livestock, apparently linked to a household or temple headed by a 'lady' (NIN) and overseen by a 'sanga,' the temple administrator or chief accountant. Many of the individual pictographs (labeled by their ZATU catalogue numbers) still resist confident translation, which is normal for this earliest stage of the script, when signs were still close to pure pictures and grammatical connectives did not yet exist.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This little clay tablet is a bookkeeping tally, not a letter or story. One entry counts 9 sheep, another 7 sheep, and a further entry a larger flock — one big unit plus six smaller units — each tagged with extra pictographic marks (possibly a boat or container sign, a reed sign, and other symbols) whose exact meaning has not survived. Two lines mention a 'lady' and one mentions a 'sanga,' a temple or estate administrator, suggesting the sheep were being counted into or out of the account of a household run by these officials. Because the script here is still purely pictographic, several of the marks are administrative shorthand that modern scholars simply cannot translate with certainty.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 9(N01) — má-sign(?) (MAR~a), na-sign(?) (NA~a), sheep (UDU~a), [sign ZATU749, variant b] 2. 7(N01) — sheep (UDU~a), [sign ZATU749, variant b] 3. [sign ZATU821], reed(?) (GI) 4. lady/mistress (NIN), SIG (quality-mark, uncertain: wool-grade/brick/"low") 5. TE (uncertain commodity/category), RAD~a (uncertain title or action), sanga-official (SANGA~a) 6. 1(N14) 6(N01) — sheep (UDU~a), tablet/bin-marker(?) (DUB~a), [sign ZATU749, variant b] 7. SIG (quality-mark, uncertain), lady/mistress (NIN)
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
9(N01) , MAR~a NA~a#? UDU~a ZATU749~b 7(N01) , UDU~a ZATU749~b , ZATU821 GI , NIN# SIG , TE RAD~a SANGA~a 1(N14) 6(N01) , UDU~a DUB~a ZATU749~b , SIG NIN
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2504. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006072) — 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.