Position in chronology
MS 2862/17
About this tablet
This small clay fragment is an administrative accounting tablet from the Uruk period, likely from the ancient city of Umma in southern Iraq, dating to roughly the late fourth millennium BCE — among the very earliest writing on earth. It is not a story or a letter but a tally: rows pairing single-unit counts with commodity or institution signs, the kind of record an early bureaucrat kept to track goods, rations, or deliveries into or out of a storehouse. Much of the tablet is broken away, so only fragments of the original list of entries survive.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a battered scrap of an ancient inventory list. Most of it is missing, but the surviving lines look like tally entries — a count of '1' followed by a sign or two naming what was counted, repeated several times down the tablet. One line seems to mention a storehouse, another may note something 'given' or 'deposited,' and several entries pair a numeral with signs that could denote containers, foodstuffs, or categories of goods, though their exact meaning is lost to us. The lines before and after these entries are broken away entirely.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [...] storehouse(?) (E2~a) X [...] , [...] [...] , X AN, egg/roe(?) (NUNUZ~a0) 1 (unit) , MAR(~a) NI(~a) 1 (unit) , KA(~a) A [...] , [...] 1 (unit) , [...] given/deposited(?) (RU) 1 (unit) , NI(~a) A 1 (unit) , KU(~b1) AN [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] E2~a# X [...] , [...] [...] , X AN NUNUZ~a0 1(N01) , MAR~a NI~a 1(N01) , KA~a A [...] , [...] 1(N01)# , [...] RU# 1(N01) , NI~a A 1(N01) , KU~b1 AN [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2862/17. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006164) — 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.