Position in chronology
MS 2516
About this tablet
This is a tiny fragment of institutional bookkeeping from the very dawn of writing — the proto-cuneiform script used in and around Uruk-period Umma, roughly 3100–2900 BCE, centuries before the Sumerian language was written in a way we can read grammatically. Scribes at this time recorded transactions as bare sequences of number-signs and pictograms, one per compartment, without verbs or sentences: a quantity, then the commodity or person it concerned. Here the recurring entries seem to track reed matting and rations reaching a group associated with 'musicians,' repeated in what looks like two parallel accounts on either side of the tablet. It is a glimpse of the earliest bureaucratic memory system ever devised, built to track goods moving through a temple or palace household.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is an administrative tally, not a story. One line records a quantity handed out or disbursed; several lines that followed are now lost. Then comes a repeating block: a unit of some commodity, two units received or 'in hand,' three units of reed matting, and one unit set aside for a group called 'musicians' (or their rations). That same sequence occurs a second time — three units of the commodity, two received, three of reed matting, one for musicians — followed by one unit of something labeled NIM, whose meaning is unclear. The tablet breaks off again after that, so we don't have the ending.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (N52-unit): disbursement (BA) [......] [......] 1 (N52-unit), 2 (units): received / into the hand of (ŠU2) 3 (units): reed mat(s) (KID) 1 (unit): [musician(s), rations (NAR SU)] 1 (N52-unit), [......] [......] 3 (N52-units), 2 (units): received / into the hand of (ŠU2) 3 (units): reed mat(s) (KID) 1 (unit): musician(s), rations (NAR SU) 1 (N34-unit): NIM (uncertain commodity/status term) [......]
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
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-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.