Position in chronology
MS 2869/05
About this tablet
This is a tiny, badly broken proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the late 4th millennium BCE), among the very earliest writing known. It appears to record small quantities of livestock (rams, goats), a fish-related entry, and possibly a musician or ration recipient, laid out in the archaic two-column list format typical of accounting dockets from a temple or institutional household in or near Umma. The individual signs are still poorly understood — some (like ZATU823) have no agreed reading at all — so this is a glimpse of bookkeeping whose full content is lost to us.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this small clay tablet is a fragmentary tally list. The top several lines are broken away entirely. Where the text picks up, one entry records 3 units of something called 'NA,' apparently given or deposited, associated with a musician or singer. Below that: 1 unit of an unidentified commodity (sign ZATU823); 1 unit involving the fish sign together with 'NI' and another element; 1 unit of a boat- or container-sign with more text now lost. After another gap, the list continues with a male sheep (a ram), an entry marked with the sign 'NUN' (its administrative meaning unclear), and finally 1 unit of goat. In short: a short inventory of small numbers of animals and goods, most of it now unreadable.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse, broken at top) [...] — [...] [...] — [...] X [...] — [...] X [...] — [...] SA(?) [...] — [...] X [...] — [...] [...] — [...] 3 (units) — NA, deposited/given (RU), musician (NAR) 1 (unit) — ZATU823 (sign of unknown reading) 1 (unit) — NI, fish (KU6), NA(~b) 1 (unit) — MAR (boat/container?), X [...] [...] — [...] [...] — male sheep / ram (UDUNITA) [...] — NUN (marker) [...] 1 (unit) — goat (MAŠ2)
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] SA~a#? [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 3(N01) , NA~a RU NAR 1(N01) , ZATU823 1(N01) , NI~a KU6~a NA~b 1(N01) , MAR~a# X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , UDUNITA~a# [...] , NUN~b# [...] 1(N01)# , MASZ2#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2869/05. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006203) — 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.