Position in chronology
MS 2862/02
About this tablet
A small, badly worn accounting tablet from the Uruk period — the world's first age of writing, before 3000 BCE — probably from the region of Umma in southern Iraq. It is not a sentence but a ledger: each box on its surface pairs a number with a commodity or personnel sign, and one entry names the office that later became the temple administrator. Only stray figures survive — a 4, a 5, signs for a ewe-related product, perhaps hoes and 'head(s)' of people — but even in ruins it shows a bureaucracy already counting goods and workers five thousand years ago.
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 administrative account. The opening entries are mostly destroyed: one line mentioned 'head(s)' (likely persons), two more are illegible, another recorded a quantity of 4 of something now lost. Then: 5 units of some small item or junior category; an entry pairing a 'horn' or measured commodity with a ewe-sign (some sheep product) and possibly hoes; and a final broken line involving an official — apparently a temple administrator — together with two signs, TE and RAD, whose meaning is no longer recoverable. The rest of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] , [...] SAG (head / person?) ... [...] 2. [...] , [...] ... (sign traces) 3. [...] , [...] ... (sign traces) 4. [...] 4(N01) , [...] 5. 5(N01) , ... TUR (small?) [...] 6. (quantity lost) , SI (horn?), U8xTAR (a ewe-sign compound; a sheep-product or animal category), AL (hoe / agricultural category?) 7. [...] , [...] the SANGA (temple administrator?), TE, RAD [...]
Our translation engine — Fable 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
[...] , [...] 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-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-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.