Position in chronology
MS 2863/14
About this tablet
This is a small fragment of a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), one of the earliest writing systems in human history, found or associated with Umma in southern Iraq. It appears to be a ledger of goods and quantities — oil or wood, beer, copper, fodder, and possibly workers or a lion-related commodity — tallied against an institutional 'house' (é) at the end. Because it is only a broken corner of a larger tablet, most entries survive as isolated numeral-plus-sign pairs rather than a connected narrative, but it gives a glimpse of the bookkeeping that ran the earliest cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken accounting tablet lists a series of small transactions, each marked with a quantity and one or two commodity signs, though most of the entries are only partly preserved. What survives includes one unit of oil (or a wood product), one unit of beer alongside an unidentified sign, two units involving fodder or plant material together with two lots of copper, and three units associated with workers and possibly a lion-skin or lion-marked good. The tablet breaks off repeatedly, so several entries are entirely lost, and it ends with a final tally of three units credited to an institutional 'house' — evidently the record was kept for or by a temple or similar establishment. Because the piece is so fragmentary, the overall purpose of the account (a delivery, ration list, or inventory) cannot be determined with certainty.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], [...] 1 (unit) — oil(?), wood/wood-product 1 (unit) — ZATU694-sign, beer [...], [...] beer, X 2 (units) — highland/foreign(-designated), fodder/plant material, copper, copper 2 (units) — X, [...] [...], [...] 1 (unit) [...], [...] 3 (units) — workers/men, lion(-product?) 1 (unit) [...], X [...] [...], [...] mouth/gate(?) [...], [...] 3 (units, N57-system) — house/institution (E2)
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(N01) , NI~a GISZ3~b# 1(N01)# , ZATU694~c KASZ~c# [...] , [...] KASZ~c# X 2(N01) , KUR~a U2~b URUDU~a URUDU~a 2(N01) , X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...] 3(N01) , ERIM~a PIRIG~b1? 1(N01)# [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] KA~a#? [...] , [...] 3(N57)? |EN2.E2~b|
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/14. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006180) — 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.