Position in chronology
MS 2869/06
About this tablet
This is a tiny broken fragment of a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the late 4th millennium BCE), among the very earliest writing in the world. It appears to be a tally of livestock — she-goats and rams — alongside numerals and a few institutional or personnel markers ('city,' 'worker'), the kind of bookkeeping a temple or palace administrator in the Umma region might have kept to track animal holdings. Because so little of the tablet survives, only scattered numbers and commodity signs can be read; the overall transaction they recorded is lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a small chip of an ancient accounting tablet, so worn and broken that only a handful of entries can be made out. It seems to be a running list of livestock counted off against numbers — some she-goats here, three rams there, two units of something marked with an uncertain qualifier — along with a mention of a 'city' or settlement and a worker or official. Most of the tablet, including whatever heading, totals, or names of the responsible parties it once had, is missing.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Fragmentary tablet; text preserved only in isolated cases across multiple broken lines) 1. [...], [...] 2. [...], [...] she-goat(s) (UD5) 3. [...], [...] ram(s) (UDUNITA) 4. [...], [...] 5. [...] 1(N01), [...] (illegible sign) 6. [...], settlement/city (URU) — person/worker (LU2) 7. 1(N01), UTUA (oven/heated-vessel category, commodity unclear) 8. 3(N01), ram(s) (UDUNITA) 9. 2(N01), NUN (qualifier/category marker, meaning uncertain) 10. [...] 1(N01), [...] 11. [...], [...] 12. [...], [...] 13. [...], [...] 14. [...], [...]
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] UD5~a# [...] , [...] UDUNITA~a# [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , [...] X , URU~a1# LU2 1(N01) , UTUA~a 3(N01) , UDUNITA~a 2(N01)# , NUN~b [...] 1(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2869/06. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006204) — 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.