Position in chronology
MS 2863/07
About this tablet
This small clay tablet comes from the very dawn of writing, the Uruk period in southern Mesopotamia (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), possibly from the area of Umma. It is a bookkeeping record: the surface is divided into ruled boxes, each holding a numeral notation (impressed circles and semicircles marking quantities) beside a few incised pictographs — signs for barley, storehouses ('house' signs), and other still-undeciphered commodity or institutional markers. Tablets like this were the working paperwork of early temple or palace administrators, tracking allotments of grain and goods case by case rather than telling a story — they are humanity's first accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger page, not a letter or story. Each box on the tablet records a quantity next to a short label: one entry lists a delivery or allotment of barley of a certain amount, marked with additional signs that may indicate a person, official, or type of processing; another entry records a smaller quantity tied to what looks like a storehouse or institutional name; a further line records still another amount linked to an unread commodity marker. Several boxes are broken away and cannot be read at all, and even where signs survive, some of the notations (like the sign catalogued only as 'ZATU795') have never been matched to a known word. In short: an inventory of a few different goods, quantities, and destinations, kept box by box, with more than half of it now lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Case 1) 4(N14) 1(N01) — barley(SZE), [commodity/ration], SAG, RAD. (Case 2) [...] , [...] (Case 3) 9(N14) — |3(N57).E2(b)|, KITI. (Case 4) 6(N14) 2(N01) — |E2(a)×3(N58)|, ZATU795, LAM(b). (Case 5) [...] 1(N14) 1(N01) 1(N39a) 1(N24) — [...] X. (Case 6) [...] , [...] X.
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
4(N14)# 1(N01) , SZE~a SAG RAD~a [...] , [...] 9(N14)# , |3(N57).E2~b| KITI 6(N14) 2(N01) , |E2~ax3(N58)| ZATU795 LAM~b [...] 1(N14)# 1(N01)# 1(N39~a)# 1(N24)# , [...] X [...] , [...] X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/07. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006173) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.