Position in chronology
MS 2684
About this tablet
A proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the very dawn of writing, around 3200–3000 BCE, probably from the region of Umma in southern Iraq. It is a bookkeeping record: a clerk counted out small quantities — twos and ones — of goods or deliveries, tagging each entry with a category sign, including one referring to the city of Adab and one sign whose meaning modern scholars have never deciphered. Texts like this are not literature but ledger lines; they show that writing was invented first of all to keep accounts.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an inventory list. The opening entry is lost. Then: two units of something small, possibly oil or fat; two vessels (or herd-units) belonging to the settlement; one entry marked with the ibex sign; one entry connected with the city of Adab; and one unit of an item written with a sign we can no longer interpret. The list continued with at least one more entry, now broken away, and traces on the reverse suggest a summary or total that is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] , [...] 2. [...] 2 : oil/fat(?) — small(?) (NI~a TUR) 3. 2 : UTUL-vessels(?) of the settlement (UTUL~a URU~a1) 4. 1 : ibex (DARA3×KAR2) 5. 1 : Adab 6. 1 : (sign ZATU799, meaning unknown) 7. [...] , [...] ... (remainder of the account broken)
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
[...] , [...] [...] 2(N01)# , NI~a# TUR# 2(N01) , UTUL~a URU~a1@n 1(N01) , |DARA3~cxKAR2| 1(N01) , ADAB# 1(N01) , ZATU799 [...] , [...] X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2684. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006105) — 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.