MS 2514

~3100 BCE·Uruk Period·P006082

About this tablet

This is a small pillow-shaped clay tablet from the very earliest phase of writing in southern Mesopotamia, the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), likely from the Umma region. It is a numerical/administrative tally — a proto-cuneiform accounting note listing quantities of grain, beer, and goats, evidently under the authority or oversight of a 'sanga,' a senior temple administrator. Tablets like this are not narrative texts but bookkeeping: small institutions recording the movement of foodstuffs and livestock in and out of temple stores, using number-signs paired with pictographic commodity signs rather than full grammatical sentences. Its interest lies less in what it says than in what it is — one of humankind's oldest surviving pieces of written record-keeping.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

This looks like a short inventory or delivery record from a temple household. One entry logs two units of an unidentified item marked by a paired sign, alongside a note involving barley. A second entry records one measure of beer, credited under the supervision of the chief temple administrator (the sanga). On the other face, two female goats are logged, then one (male) goat, again under the senior administrator, and finally three portions of barley are tallied. In short: a handful of small grain, beer, and livestock entries kept by (or for) a temple official — the everyday bookkeeping of one of the world's first bureaucracies, though several of the individual notation signs resist confident translation today.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

(Face 1 / Case 1) 2 (units): sign ZATU694, DA, DA. (Case 2) — NI, grain (barley), AN, DI, RAD. (Case 3) 1 (unit): beer, sign ZATU737×E(?). (Case 4) — chief sanga-official (administrator). (Face 2 / Case 5) 2 (units): she-goat, DI, A. (Case 6) 1 (unit): goat (billy-goat); chief sanga-official, senior. (Case 7) 3 (units): BAR, NI, grain (barley), AN.

Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.

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Transliteration

2(N01) , ZATU694~c DA~a DA~a
, NI~a SZE~a@t AN DI RAD~a
1(N01) , KASZ~c |ZATU737xE~a|?
, GAL~a SANGA~a
2(N01) , UD5~a DI A
1(N01) , MASZ2 GAL~a SANGA~a GAL~a
3(N01) , BAR NI~a# SZE~a@t AN

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2514. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).

Attribution

Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006082) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).

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