Position in chronology
MS 2511/1
About this tablet
One of the oldest categories of written record in human history: a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3100–3000 BCE), probably from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records quantities of animals — ewes (U8), female goats (UD5~a), and possibly lambs or other livestock — against commodity signs and disbursement notations. The scratchy round impressions are numerals, not words in any linguistic sense; the 'writing' here is really a counting and accounting system at the very dawn of literacy. Tablets like this were the practical backbone of temple and palace economies, tracking who received what and in what quantity.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A stock account, fragmentary and partially illegible. Readable entries include: 7 units of one commodity (possibly a foodstuff or processed good, signs NI and NE); 7 units of another item; a larger quantity — something in the order of 180-plus units — distributed or allocated under the heading BA, with a wood/reed item (GISZ); then a livestock section: 2 ewes, 23 female goats, 1 ewe-lamb. Several lines at the beginning, middle, and end are too broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 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)# [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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.