Position in chronology
MS 2863/04
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet fragment from the proto-cuneiform period at Uruk (roughly the late 4th millennium BCE), likely from Umma or a related southern Mesopotamian settlement. It appears to be an administrative record — the kind of document early accountants used to track commodities, personnel, or land under the authority of an official (the EN, or 'lord/overseer') — possibly involving dependent workers or people associated with the Subir/Subartu region to the north. So little survives that we cannot reconstruct the actual transaction; what remains are scattered sign-groups, a numeral notation, and a placename or classifier ('city/settlement'), the bare skeleton of what was once a fuller account.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet fragment is too damaged to read as a connected document. What survives are isolated words and numbers from what looks like a bookkeeping record: a mention of dependent workers (possibly people from the Subartu region), a reference to a lord or official, a term meaning something like 'given' or 'deposited' tied to a place, the word 'city' standing alone, and further along a quantity written as one large unit plus seven smaller units. The rest of the lines, both before and after these fragments, are broken away and cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Case 1) [...] , [...] x [broken] (Case 2) [...] , [...] x SZUBUR (dependent-workers/Subarians) — EN (lord/high official) — ZATU624 [sign uncertain, damaged] — NU (negation/classifier particle) (Case 3) [...] , RU (given/deposited) — KI (place/locative) (Case 4) [...] , [...] [broken] (Case 5) , URU (city/settlement) (Case 6) [...] , [...] [broken] (Case 7) 1(N14) 7(N01) [...] , x [...] [numeral notation: one N14-unit, seven N01-units] (Case 8) [...] , [...] [broken]
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 [...] , [...] X SZUBUR# EN~a# ZATU624~b#? NU [...] , RU KI [...] , [...] , URU~a1 [...] , [...] 1(N14) 7(N01)# [...] , X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/04. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006170) — 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.