Position in chronology
MS 2863/02
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the late fourth millennium BCE), one of the earliest kinds of writing in human history — not a sentence but an accounting record. It comes from the very first phase of literacy, when scribes at a place like Umma used incised numeral signs and pictographic commodity signs, arranged in a grid of cases, to track livestock: rams, sheep, and other goods identified by archaic signs whose exact administrative meaning (a quality grade? a pen of origin? a delivery status?) is still debated by specialists. The tablet is broken on several sides, so much of the original record — including whatever total or name closed the account — is lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary inventory tablet. The surviving text lists quantities of animals and goods using early numeral notation: at least one entry for a commodity called 'UTUA', an entry of one unit of ram (male sheep), an entry of two-plus-seven units under a category marker whose meaning isn't fully understood, a line mentioning what may be a wool grade or brick term followed by an unidentified sign, and a final line with more numerals followed by 'sheep.' Most of the tablet's beginning and several commodity terms are broken away or illegible, so this reads as a partial livestock or goods tally rather than a complete document — the kind of everyday bookkeeping scribes produced by the thousands in this period, of which only fragments like this one survive.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) Line 1: [...] , [...] (broken) Line 2: [...] , UTUA~a (broken count — commodity: UTUA~a) Line 3: 1(N14) , UDUNITA~a — "1 (unit N14): male sheep (ram)" Line 4: 2(N14) 7(N01) , NUN~b# — "2 (units N14) + 7 (units N01): NUN~b (category/grade)" Line 5: [...] SIG# RAD~a# — broken; then SIG, then RAD~a Line 6: 1(N34)# 2(N14)# [...] , [...] UDU~a [...] — "1 (unit N34) + 2 (units N14) [...]: [...] sheep [...]"
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
[...] , [...] [...] , UTUA~a 1(N14) , UDUNITA~a 2(N14) 7(N01)# , NUN~b# , [...] SIG# RAD~a# 1(N34)# 2(N14)# [...] , [...] UDU~a [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/02. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006168) — 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.