Position in chronology
MS 2863/21
About this tablet
This is a tiny corner fragment of an administrative account tablet from the Uruk period, one of the earliest phases of writing anywhere in the world (roughly the later fourth millennium BCE). What survives is a column of tally entries — small numbers paired with commodity or category signs, including what may be containers, oil, a ram, and a repeated label whose exact bureaucratic meaning (a work-group, an animal class, a total?) is still debated by specialists. It is a scrap of the vast record-keeping apparatus that Mesopotamian cities used to track goods, animals, and labor before writing had even developed full grammar — valuable less for its content, which is largely lost, than for what it shows about how early accounting worked.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What's left of this tablet is a fragment of an old inventory or tally sheet. The first couple of lines are gone. Then comes an entry mentioning a horn (or possibly a stylus) and 'a man' or worker; then '1 of a boat-shaped vessel'; then '1 of a jar-type container, holding oil or fat.' A line after that mentions something paired with a sky/star-shaped sign, but it's too broken to read further. Two more lines are almost completely lost. Further down, an entry records '2 of a marked category,' another records '1 male sheep (ram),' and two lines carry a repeated label whose meaning isn't settled — maybe a group of people or an animal class. The tablet ends with two more numeric entries whose accompanying words are lost. In short: a scrap of a bookkeeping list, mostly broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) 1. [...] , [...] 2. [...] , [...] 3. [...] , [...] SI (horn?) — LU2 (man) 4. 1 — MAR-vessel(?), "I" 5. 1 — ŠIR-vessel: NI (oil/fat?) 6. [...] , [...] ... AN 7. [...] , [...] 8. , [...] 9. [...] 2 — NUN (category/quality marker) 10. [...] 1 — UDU.NITA (male sheep, ram) 11. [...] , [...] KIŠ (category label) 12. [...] , [...] KIŠ (category label) 13. [...] 2 (large-unit count) — [...] 14. [...] 2 — [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] SI# LU2 1(N01) , MAR~a I 1(N01) , SZIR~b NI~a [...] , [...] X AN [...] , [...] , [...] [...] 2(N01)# , NUN~b [...] 1(N01)# , UDUNITA~a# [...] , [...] KISZ# [...] , [...] KISZ# [...] 2(N14)# , [...] [...] 2(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/21. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006187) — 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.