Position in chronology
MS 2512
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from the very dawn of writing — the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE, probably from Umma in southern Iraq. It is an account: ruled boxes each pairing a number with a commodity sign, among them what are conventionally read as salt, natron (or soapwort), and a bird. Almost every entry has lost its numeral or its commodity to breakage, so the total being recorded cannot be reconstructed. Texts like this are the bureaucratic bookkeeping that writing was invented to do, centuries before anyone used it to record language as such.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a ledger in fragments. The first few boxes have lost both their figures and most of their goods; one preserves a triangular commodity mark, another the sign for natron, another a bird together with a second commodity. Further down, one entry reads 1 (unit) of salt, and below it 1 (unit) of a category whose name is broken off, followed by another single unit. The rest of the tablet — the lower front and nearly all of the back — is chipped away or worn smooth, so no total can be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] — [...] 2. [...] — [...] (one unidentified sign) 3. [...] — [...] ZATU659 4. [...] — [...] NAGA (natron / soapwort) 5. [...] — [...] MUŠEN (bird), RAD 6. [...] — [...] ZATU659(?) 7. (number lost) — 1(N57) MUN (salt) 8. 1(N01) — IB [...] 9. 1(N01)(?) [...] — [...] (The remainder of the surface, including the lower obverse and much of the reverse, is broken away or effaced; no further continuous entries are recoverable.)
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] ZATU659 [...] , [...] NAGA~a [...] , [...] MUSZEN# RAD~a [...] , [...] ZATU659? , 1(N57) MUN~a1 1(N01) , IB~a [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2512. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006080) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.