Position in chronology
MS 2862/02
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably from the ancient city of Umma in southern Iraq. It appears to be an administrative record of the kind produced by early temple bureaucracies — tracking quantities of commodities or personnel under an institutional official, possibly a temple administrator (sanga). Only fragments of the original text survive, but even this damaged remnant is historically significant: it represents some of the very earliest writing ever produced by human beings, a moment when accounting needs pushed Mesopotamian administrators to invent a system of recording on clay. The tablet is now in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records several entries that are now too broken to read in full. What survives shows numerical tallies — four units of something, then five units of something else — alongside a term that likely names a commodity or tool (possibly agricultural), and a reference to a temple administrator involved in some transaction or allocation. The surrounding context for each entry is lost. The rest of the text is too damaged to recover.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] SAG[?] X [...] [...] X [...] [...] X [...] 4 (units) [?] [...] 5 (units) X TUR [...] SI |(U8xTAR)~b| AL[?] [...] [...] temple-administrator TE RAD[?] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] SAG# X [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X [...] 4(N01)# , [...] 5(N01) , X TUR [...] , SI |(U8xTAR)~b| AL# [...] , [...] SANGA~a# TE# RAD~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2862/02. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006149) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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.