Position in chronology
MS 2689
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the very beginning of writing — the proto-cuneiform Uruk period, roughly 3350–3100 BCE — likely from an administrative office at or near Umma in southern Iraq. It is a tally: a series of numbered entries listing commodities and livestock (birds, sheep, containers, water allotments) by quantity, the everyday bookkeeping of an early temple or palace economy. No verbs, grammar, or narrative survive from this stage of writing — only nouns and numbers, the bare bones of an accountant's ledger. Because so much of the tablet is missing, only fragments of a larger accounting record can be recovered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is part of an inventory list, written in the earliest form of cuneiform. The first few entries record small quantities — three units of something involving a container or vessel; three more units tied to a water allotment and a fiber or rope-type good; two units logged against an entry involving a bird and a goat (or possibly "interest"). Several following lines that once recorded more entries are now completely broken away. Near the end, a combined quantity notation — three of one counting unit plus one of another — is recorded against sheep, evidently a livestock count. After that, one more entry mentions a plow or plow-team, but the tablet breaks off before its quantity or the rest of the description can be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse, case 1) [...]: 3 (N01) units — [...], (a broken sign), the “mouth” (KA) sign, MA (vessel/boat sign). (Case 2) 3 (N01) units: TAK4 (“remainder/leftover allocation”) — A (water) — GU — ŠA. (Case 3) 2 (N01) units: DUB (tablet/record sign) — MUŠEN (bird) — MAŠ (goat/interest). (Case 4) [...]: [...] (broken). (Case 5) 5 (N01) units: [...] (broken). (Case 6) 3 (N01) units [...]: [...] (broken). (Case 7) 1 (N01) unit: [...] (broken). (Case 8) 1 (N01) unit: [...] (broken). (Case 9) 3(N14) + 1(N01) units: UDU (sheep/small livestock). (Case 10) [...]: APIN (plow/plow-team) — [broken sign] — [...] (broken). (Case 11) [...]: [...] (broken).
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
[...] 3(N01)# , [...] X KA~a MA 3(N01) , TAK4~a A GU SZA 2(N01) , DUB~b MUSZEN MASZ [...] , [...] 5(N01)# , [...] 3(N01)# [...] , [...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) , [...] 3(N14) 1(N01) , UDU~a [...] , APIN~a#? X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2689. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006110) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-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.