Position in chronology
MS 2511/1
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the very earliest forms of writing, found at or near ancient Umma in southern Iraq. It is a numerical account — a bureaucrat's tally of goods and livestock (ewes, she-goats, and other commodities whose signs are only partly preserved) recorded against numbers using the archaic proto-cuneiform notation system. Tablets like this are not literature but the raw paperwork of an early city administration, keeping track of what was disbursed, received, or held in storage. Because the piece is so fragmentary, only isolated entries survive rather than a continuous, fully legible record.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives looks like entries from an old ledger. One line records a quantity marked as 'disbursed,' paired with a commodity whose name is broken away. Another records seven units of something associated with the signs NI and NE — possibly a foodstuff or fuel product, though this isn't certain. A further line lists seven units of an unidentified item next to a sign meaning 'head' or 'person,' perhaps naming a recipient or overseer. Later lines are clearer: two ewes, roughly twenty-three she-goats, and one unit of a commodity linked to an oven or heating vessel. Several other lines are too damaged to make out at all. Altogether it reads like a fragment of a livestock and goods inventory kept by an early city official, most of it now lost to breakage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [...], [...] 1(N57) BA (disbursed) 7(N01), NI-NE [...], [...] ... SAG 7(N01), ZATU659 LAGAB [...] 3(N34) 1(N01), 1(N57) BA GIŠ [...] [...], ... [...] (continuing / reverse) 2(N01), U8 (ewes) 2(N14) 3(N01), UD5 (she-goats) 1(N01), UTUA , [...] 2(N01), [...] 2(N01) [...], [...]
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(N57) BA? 7(N01) , NI~a NE~a [...] , [...] X SAG# 7(N01) , ZATU659# LAGAB~a [...] 3(N34) 1(N01) , 1(N57) BA GISZ [...] [...] , X [...] 2(N01) , U8 2(N14) 3(N01)# , UD5~a 1(N01) , UTUA~a# , [...] 2(N01) , [...] 2(N01)# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2511/1. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006079) — 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.