Position in chronology
MS 2516
About this tablet
An administrative account from the very dawn of writing, around 3300–3000 BCE, probably from Umma in southern Iraq. A bookkeeper recorded quantities of goods — apparently including reed mats and an allotment connected with a musician — in ruled boxes on both faces of the clay tablet, with the second face carrying what look like summarizing totals of the same entries. Tablets like this predate connected sentences: they are pure accounting, numbers pressed into clay beside signs for commodities and people, and they show that writing was invented for bureaucracy before it was ever used for literature.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger, front and back. The front records a series of allotments: one large unit of something marked as 'distributed', another large unit of an item now lost, two units booked as received, three reed mats, and one item for the musician; a further large-unit entry follows before the surface breaks off. The back repeats the entries as a running total: three large units, two received, three reed mats, one for the musician, and sixty units of a commodity or destination written NIM whose meaning we no longer know. The final entry is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N52) — allotted (BA; sign damaged) [...] 1(N52) — ... 2(N01) — received (ŠU2) 3(N01) — reed mats (KID; sign damaged) 1(N01) — [(for) the musician (NAR SU)] 1(N52) — ... [...] — [...] 3(N52) — ... 2(N01) — received (ŠU2) 3(N01) — reed mats (KID) 1(N01) — (for) the musician (NAR SU) 1(N34) (= 60 units) — NIM (entry lost) — [...]
Our translation engine — Fable 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(N52) , BA# , [...] 1(N52) , 2(N01) , SZU2 3(N01) , KID~b# 1(N01)# , [NAR SU~a] 1(N52)# , [...] , [...] 3(N52)# , 2(N01) , SZU2 3(N01) , KID~b 1(N01) , NAR SU~a 1(N34) , NIM~a , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2516. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006084) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-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.