Position in chronology
MS 2690
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay fragment from the Uruk period, one of the earliest stages of writing in Mesopotamia (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), found at or near ancient Umma in southern Iraq. It appears to be an administrative tally — a two-column list pairing numerals with commodities and categories, including linen cloth, a female worker or animal, a city or institutional marker, a sanga (temple administrator), and a plow or plow-team, possibly connected to road or journey provisions. Texts like this are not narratives but bookkeeping: the raw accounting slips that let an early Sumerian institution track goods, labor, and personnel — a glimpse of bureaucracy at the very dawn of writing.
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 old inventory list, so worn and broken that only pieces of it survive. It seems to record quantities of linen cloth, along with an entry involving a woman (perhaps a worker) and a ration or allotment, tied to a town or institution overseen by an administrator called a sanga. Further down, more numbers are logged alongside what might be road-provisions and a plow or plow-team. Most of the tablet — the beginning, several middle lines, and the very end — is too damaged to read at all.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] x [...] , [...] [...] , [...] cloth (TUG2) [...] , [...] 1 (unit) , linen cloth (GADA) 2 (units), 1 (unit) , woman/female — BAR (ration/disbursement) , city/settlement (URU) — sanga-official [...] , cloth (TUG2) [...] , [...] 1 (unit) , [...] 1 (unit) , 1 (unit) [...] BAR , road/journey (KASKAL) — plow (APIN) [...] , [...] x
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] TUG2~a# [...] , [...] 1(N01) , GADA~a# 2(N01) , 1(N57) SAL BAR , URU~a1 SANGA~a [...] , TUG2~a# [...] , [...] 1(N01)# , [...] 1(N01)# , 1(N01)# [...] BAR# , KASKAL APIN~a [...] , [...] X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2690. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006111) — 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.