Position in chronology
MS 2863/05
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet fragment from the Uruk period (roughly the late fourth millennium BCE), one of the earliest forms of writing anywhere in the world. It is not a story or a letter but a numerical/administrative record — a scribe's tally of commodities such as workers or laborers, sheep, and possibly fodder, each entry marked with impressed numeral signs of different proto-cuneiform counting systems. Tablets like this come from the accounting apparatus of early Mesopotamian institutions (temple or palace households) that tracked labor, animals, and rations. Only fragments of the original entries survive, so the full transaction cannot be reconstructed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a torn scrap of an ancient tally sheet. What survives are a few rows of numbers next to short notes: one row seems to record a quantity of workers or laborers along with something described as 'highland' and possibly fodder or plant material, though the line breaks off before we learn the full context. Another row gives a count that is now illegible. A further row records sheep or small livestock along with a number. The rest of the tablet — the beginning, the end, and several lines in between — is missing or too damaged to read, so we're left with disconnected fragments of what was once a full accounting entry.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Column entry 1) [...] , [...] (Column entry 2) 1(N50) 5(N14) , ERIM~a (workers/laborers) KUR~a (highland/foreign-land designation) U2~b (fodder/plant material) [...] (Column entry 3) 4(N14) 5(N01) , [...] (Column entry 4) [...] , [...] (Column entry 5) 3(N34) 5(N01) , UDU~a (sheep/small livestock) (Column entry 6) [...] , [...]
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
[...] , [...] 1(N50)# 5(N14)# , ERIM~a KUR~a# U2~b [...] 4(N14) 5(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] 3(N34)# 5(N01)# , UDU~a [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/05. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006171) — 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.