Position in chronology
MS 2680
About this tablet
This is a small, badly worn proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from the Uruk period, likely from the Umma region, recording quantities of livestock (goats, sheep) and possibly grain rations. Such tablets were the earliest form of writing, used by temple or palace administrators to track herds and stores rather than to tell a story. The surviving signs are numerals paired with commodity or livestock markers — the everyday bookkeeping of a redistributive economy over five thousand years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken tally sheet lists a series of counted items, mostly livestock. One entry records a quantity of two units under a category marker whose exact administrative meaning (perhaps a grade or source of livestock) isn't fully understood. Another line counts two goats. Several more lines give small counts of one unit each, but what they're counting is lost to damage. Further down, a larger number is followed by what may be a barley or grain notation, and near the end a count of sheep appears. The tablet breaks off before the accounting can be completed, so the total and the overall purpose of the record are not recoverable.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 2(N01) — NUN~b [...] [...] 2(N01) — goat(s) (MASZ2) 1(N01) — ...[...] 1(N01) — ...[...] [...] — [...] 1(N34) — [...] ... barley (SZE~a) ... [...] 2(N34) 6(N01) [...] — sheep (UDU~a) [...] [...] — [...] ...
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
[...] 2(N01)# , NUN~b# [...] [...] 2(N01)# , MASZ2# 1(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01)# , X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N34) , [...] X BA SZE~a X [...] 2(N34)# 6(N01)# [...] , UDU~a# [...] [...] , [...] X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2680. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006101) — 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.