Position in chronology
MS 2677
About this tablet
A fragment of one of humanity's oldest written documents: a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), possibly from Umma in southern Iraq. It is an accounting record, tallying single units of goods — a large drinking vessel, beer, a horn(?), and other commodities — in ruled cases, some entries linked to a high official (the EN) and to institutional locales like the courtyard. Writing at this date was pure bookkeeping, invented to track goods, not to record speech, so the text is a list of signs and numbers rather than sentences.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a broken warehouse ledger. The readable entries say roughly: something for the lord and the prince (or their institutions); three units of something connected with beer; one large cup or libation vessel; one horn(?) belonging to the courtyard; one unit of ERIN; a reed-unit entry mentioning Šubur; and a container entry involving the NUN institution. The opening lines, a line in the middle, and the final two entries are too damaged to read — the beginning and end of the account are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] , [...] the EN (lord/priest-ruler) ... NUN (prince/institution) 2. [...] , [...] (two illegible signs) 3. [...] 3(N01) , ŠA, TAK4, beer 4. [...] , [...] 5. 1(N01) , a GAL-vessel (large cup), ŠITA(?) (libation vessel?) 6. 1(N01) , SI (horn?), (of the) courtyard 7. 1(N01) , ERIN 8. ...... , reed(-unit?), ŠUBUR, UŠ 9. [...] , GA2-container ... ŠE3 ... NUN(?), IM(?) 10. [...] , [...] 11. [...] , [...]
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
[...] , [...] EN~a# A@t NUN~a [...] , [...] X X [...] 3(N01)# , SZA TAK4~a KASZ~c [...] , [...] 1(N01) , GAL~a SZITA~a1? 1(N01) , SI KISAL~b1 1(N01) , ERIN , GI SZUBUR USZ~a# [...] , GA2~a2 SZE3 NUN~a# IM~a#? [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2677. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006098) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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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.