Position in chronology
MS 2862/09
About this tablet
This small clay fragment is one of the very earliest forms of writing on earth — a proto-cuneiform numerical tablet from Uruk, Mesopotamia's first great city, dating to roughly 3300–3100 BCE. It was probably made in or near Umma and used to record quantities of some commodity (grain, animals, or labor) using impressed circular and wedge-shaped number marks rather than words — writing was not yet used for language, only for counting. The tablet is badly broken, so almost none of the original entries survive intact; what remains is chiefly a cluster of number-signs (N50, N45, N63, N48, N34 — technical labels scholars use for these archaic impressed numerals) belonging to at least two different counting systems, which tells us the scribe was tallying more than one kind of good or measure.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is basically a fragment of an ancient tally sheet. In the lines we can still make out, someone recorded a string of numbers — one entry combining a '1', a '4', and other counted units, and a following entry combining '1', another '1', a '4', and a '7' — using the round and oval punch-marks that served as numerals before writing could spell out words. No commodity name or person's name survives to tell us what was being counted; the rest of the tablet, front and back, is too broken or worn to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) Column i 1. [...] , [...] 2. [...] , [...] x 3. [...] 1(N50) 4(N45) [...] , [...] 4. 1(N63) 1(N50) 4(N48) 7(N34) [...] , x [...] 5. [...] , [...] 6. [...] , [...] (Remainder of tablet — edges and reverse shown in photograph — uninscribed or bearing no legible signs beyond the numerical impressions noted above.)
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N50) 4(N45)# [...] , [...] 1(N63) 1(N50) 4(N48) 7(N34)# [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2862/09. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006156) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.