Position in chronology
MS 2520
About this tablet
This small clay tablet is an administrative record from the Uruk period (roughly the late fourth millennium BCE), likely from Umma in southern Iraq — one of the very earliest phases of writing, when scribes used pictographic signs pressed into wet clay and organized their entries into ruled boxes ('cases') rather than continuous lines. The surviving fragments mention a quantity of one unit of something and a two-sign entry combining a wool- or quality-related sign with a sign of unclear meaning, suggesting this was a tally of goods — perhaps wool, textiles, or rations — moving through an early institutional household. Because so much of the tablet is broken away, the actual transaction it recorded cannot be reconstructed with any confidence; it stands mainly as a physical witness to the birth of accounting and writing itself.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only fragments of this ancient inventory tablet survive. One line records a quantity of one unit of an unnamed item; another line pairs two signs — one probably meaning something like 'wool' or a quality grade, the other of unknown meaning — that together may denote a specific type of good or its handling. Several more lines follow but are broken away entirely, so their contents are lost. The back of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse, case-ruled account; text organized in registers) [...] , [...] , [...] SIG RAD~a [...] [...] , [...] 1(N02) [...] , X [...] X [...] , [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] (Reverse: uninscribed)
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
[...] , [...] , [...] SIG RAD~a [...] [...] , [...] 1(N02)# [...] , X [...] X [...] , [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2520. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006088) — 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.