Position in chronology
MS 2862/16
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the earliest forms of writing in the world, likely from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It is an administrative account — a list of goods and quantities, including beer, oil, and possibly rations or personnel — kept by an early bureaucrat to track distributions or holdings tied to an institution (a 'house' or temple-like body). Because so many of the signs (AN, NI, TE, SZUBUR) have no fixed meaning yet in this earliest stage of writing, much of what the tablet actually records remains genuinely uncertain to modern scholars — it is a glimpse of accounting at the very dawn of literacy, before the writing system had settled its own vocabulary.
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 old accounting tablet, so worn and broken that only pieces of individual entries survive. It seems to list quantities — one unit of beer here, one unit there — alongside people or goods tied to a household or institution: something involving oil, something involving a group of workers (possibly from the Subir region to the north), and entries marked with what might be a 'total in hand' or headcount notation. There's also a strange line pairing beer with 'bird' and 'goat,' which may point to a mixed ration or offering. The tablet breaks off before and after nearly every line, so the full transaction it once recorded is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] ... [...] , [...] house/institution (E2) [...] , ... AN GUB3 ("left/standing") 1(N01) , beer (KASZ) 1(N04) AN ... , TE SZUBUR (dependent workers?) 1(N01) , GUG2 NI (oil/fat pouch?) [...] , [...] 1(N01) , interior/contents (ŠA3) [...] 1(N01) , AN SAGSZU ("persons in hand/under authority") 1(N01) , beer (KASZ) bird (MUŠEN) goat/interest (MAŠ) AN NI 1(N01) , AN NI ... [...] [...] , [...]
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 [...] , [...] E2~b [...] , X AN GUB3~a 1(N01) , KASZ~c# 1(N04) AN , TE SZUBUR 1(N01) , GUG2 NI~a [...] , [...] 1(N01)# , SZA3~a1# [...] 1(N01) , AN SAGSZU 1(N01) , KASZ~c MUSZEN MASZ AN NI~a 1(N01) , AN NI~a X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2862/16. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006163) — 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.