Position in chronology
MS 2512
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the very earliest phase of writing in Mesopotamia, the proto-cuneiform (Uruk) period, roughly the late fourth millennium BCE, probably from the Umma region in southern Iraq. It is an administrative record — a list of commodities or personnel, ruled into cases with numerals and pictographic signs (a salt-sign, a bird-sign, a plant-sign that later means soapwort or natron) — but so little of the tablet survives that no coherent transaction can be reconstructed. Tablets like this are among humanity's oldest bookkeeping documents, used by Uruk-period administrators to track goods such as salt, plants, and possibly bird-related products moving through an early institutional household.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an ancient accounting tablet, so damaged that most entries are lost. What survives are the tail ends of a list: several broken lines naming goods or categories (one entry uses an unidentified sign, another what looks like a soapwort or natron plant, another a bird-related entry), followed by a line recording one unit of salt, and then two further lines each recording a single unit of something (one tagged 'IB', both trailing off into further breaks). It's the ancient equivalent of a torn inventory sheet — we can see it was tallying quantities of specific goods, but can no longer read the totals or context that would tell us what the tally was for.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [...] , [...] 2. [...] , [...] X 3. [...] , [...] ZATU659 4. [...] , [...] naga(-a) ("soapwort/natron"-sign) 5. [...] , [...] bird-sign RAD(-a) 6. [...] , [...] ZATU659(?) 7. , 1(N57) salt 8. 1(N01) , IB(-a) [...] 9. 1(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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] 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-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.