Position in chronology
MS 2863/17
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), one of humanity's earliest forms of writing, used to record livestock — ewes, she-goats, rams, and goats — tallied in discrete numerical cases on the reverse. The obverse is badly encrusted and eroded, but the reverse preserves a neat grid of boxes, each holding a numeral sign and a small pictograph for an animal or commodity, exactly the layout scribes at cities like Umma used to track herds moving through a temple or palace economy. The final broken lines mention an ox and what may be a place name, suggesting the animals were being delivered to or accounted for at a specific location or under a specific official's authority, but the details are lost to damage.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a tally of animals: two ewes, twenty-two she-goats, one unidentified item (recorded under the sign UTUA), six animals marked with a special category or grade sign, one ram, one goat, and thirty-three sheep. The text then breaks, but the next surviving words mention something 'in the hand of' or under the authority of an ox, followed by another partly-legible line naming a fish or food item, another reference to an ox, and the beginning of a place name or location marker before the text breaks off entirely. It reads like an inventory or delivery record for a herd, with the final accounting details — who received the animals, and where — now lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], [...] 2 (units) ewes (U8) 2 (tens) 2 (units) she-goats (UD5~a) 1 (unit) UTUA~a (commodity uncertain) 6 (units) [of] NUN~b (grade/category) 1 (unit) ram (UDUNITA~a, male sheep) 1 (unit) goat (MASZ2) [3 (tens)] 3 (units), sheep (UDU~a) [...], hand of the ox (ŠU GU4) , KU~b1(fish/food sign), MUNSZUB~b, ox, place/locative KI [...]
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
[...] , [...] 2(N01) U8 2(N14) 2(N01) UD5~a 1(N01) UTUA~a 6(N01) NUN~b 1(N01) UDUNITA~a 1(N01) MASZ2 [3(N14)] 3(N01)# , UDU~a [...] , SZU GU4 , KU~b1# MUNSZUB~b GU4# KI [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/17. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006183) — 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.