Position in chronology
MS 2862/05
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the Uruk period, one of the very earliest forms of writing, used to record quantities of goods or animals in an administrative account — likely from Umma in southern Iraq. It is severely worn and broken, so most of the commodity signs that would identify what was being counted (grain, animals, workers, or rations) are lost, leaving only a sequence of numerals: 2, 3, 2, 1, and 1. Tablets like this were the bookkeeping tools of an early bureaucracy, the ancestor of all later cuneiform accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a bare list of quantities — a running count of some commodity or set of items, entry after entry: two units, then a broken line with three units and something unreadable beside it, then two units, then one unit, then one unit again. The descriptive words that would tell us what was being counted — grain, animals, or workers — have not survived; only the numbers remain legible. The tablet breaks off before and after each of these entries, so we cannot reconstruct the full inventory or its context.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] 2(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] 3(N01) X [...] [...] , [...] 2(N01) , [...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
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)# , [...] [...] , [...] 3(N01)# , X [...] [...] , [...] 2(N01)# , [...] 1(N01)# , [...] 1(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2862/05. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006152) — 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.