Position in chronology
MS 2863/28
About this tablet
This is a small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3100 BCE), one of the very earliest forms of writing anywhere in the world. It is not a narrative text but a tally record — a series of numerical entries paired with commodity or personnel signs (grain, hide, reed, an overseer or ration category, a 'land' designation), the kind of bookkeeping an early Mesopotamian institution used to track goods or labor. Much of the tablet's surface is worn or broken, so several entries survive only as bare numerals or isolated signs, but the overall structure — ruled cases on the front, a further grid of entries on the back — is typical of Uruk-period accounting tablets used to record distributions or totals within a temple or administrative household.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This looks like an old accounting slip. The beginning is missing. Then someone recorded '2 units' under a heading that seems to mark an overseer or category, next to a term for a rope or beam. The next entry is broken too. Then '1 unit' is recorded under what may be a chief's or summary heading, paired with a term for hide or skin. Below that: '7 units, disbursed'; '6 units, of reed'; and (partly restored) '5 units, of the land/Sumer.' The tablet ends with a larger figure, '18 units,' followed by broken signs that seem to mean something was delivered or brought, next to another unclear category marker. The rest is lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [...] , [...] , 2(N57) PA~a UR3~b2 [...] , [...] , 1(N57) PAP~a SU~a 7(N01) , BA 6(N01) , GI [5(N01)] , [KALAM~b] 1(N14) 8(N01) , [...] DU TE [...]
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(N57) PA~a UR3~b2 [...] , [...] , 1(N57) PAP~a SU~a 7(N01) , BA 6(N01) , GI [5(N01)] , [KALAM~b] 1(N14) 8(N01)# , [...] DU TE [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/28. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006194) — 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.