Position in chronology
MS 2862/01
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), one of the very earliest kinds of writing, when scribes recorded quantities of goods, workers, or institutional allocations in boxed-off cases rather than full sentences. The surviving lines pair small numerals with sign-groups naming an official (the 'sanga', a temple administrator), an institutional building ('house'), and possibly a category of dependent laborers ('Szubur') — suggesting this was an accounting record tied to a temple or estate near ancient Umma. Much of the tablet's text is lost to breakage, so the full transaction it recorded cannot be reconstructed with certainty.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary accounting tablet, the kind an early Uruk-period bookkeeper would have kept to track goods or people belonging to a temple household. The surviving entries read something like: 'Two units — for the sanga administrator; [a term we can't fully translate].' Then: 'One unit — a bed or platform, tied to a cattle-stall or storage sector.' Then: 'Two units — belonging to the house/institution, under an overseer.' Two more lines are completely broken and cannot be read. The last surviving line seems to mention dependent workers, possibly people from the Subir region, along with a quality-grade term (perhaps for wool or brick) and the same obscure title-word seen in line one. Because the tablet is broken in several places and many of its signs have no certain later reading, only a skeletal outline of the record survives.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) 1. 2 (units) — sanga-official (chief administrator); RAD~a (unclear archaic term, possibly a title/action) 2. [...] — [...] (broken) 3. 1 (unit) — NA2~a (bed/platform sign); AB~a (cattle-stall / institutional term) 4. 2 (units) — E2~b (house/institution); PA~a (overseer / ration-category sign) 5. [...] — [...] (broken) 6. [...] — [...]; GIR3@g~c (foot/path sign, compound reading); SZUBUR (dependent workers / people of Subir); SIG (low-grade / wool-quality / brick sign); RAD~a (unclear archaic term) (Reverse: additional case-divisions with further signs are visible in the photograph, but no transliteration is preserved for them — the surface here is worn and the entries cannot be read.)
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) , SANGA~a RAD~a [...] , [...] 1(N01) , NA2~a AB~a 2(N01) , E2~b PA~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...] GIR3@g~c SZUBUR SIG RAD~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2862/01. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006148) — 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.