Position in chronology
MS 2684
About this tablet
This is a small fragment of an administrative account tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the later fourth millennium BCE), among the very earliest writing in the world. It is a tally of commodities or ration-goods — bowls, an NI-commodity, and several still-undeciphered sign categories — each counted with a simple numeral and identified by a pictographic classifier, one of which may reference the city of Adab. Tablets like this were not literature but bookkeeping: a scribe recording quantities of goods moving through an institutional household, store, or temple, in a script that had not yet developed a way to write full sentences or grammar.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving lines read like entries in a stock ledger: two units of a commodity called NI, marked 'small' or 'junior'; two bowls or vessels tied to a city designation; one unit each of three further items, one of which may be labeled 'Adab' and two of which use signs we still cannot translate. The tablet breaks off before and after this list, so we don't know what led into it or what followed — only this short run of numbered goods survives legible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] 2(N01), NI~a TUR ( "2 units of NI-commodity, small/junior grade") 2(N01), UTUL~a URU~a1@n ("2 units: bowl(-vessel) — of the city/URU-classifier") 1(N01), |DARA3~cxKAR2| ("1 unit: [compound sign DARA3xKAR2, uninterpreted]") 1(N01), ADAB ("1 unit: Adab") 1(N01), ZATU799 ("1 unit: [uninterpreted sign]") [...] , [...] X (break; traces only)
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)# , 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-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.