Position in chronology
MS 2869/09 + MS 2869/10
About this tablet
This is a small fragmentary administrative tablet from the Uruk period, likely from Umma, recording quantities of goods or personnel against institutional titles — a builder/mason, a vizier or minister, and a measure of salt among them. Tablets like this were used by early bureaucracies to track allocations of commodities and labor, and this piece — physically broken into two joining fragments (MS 2869/09 and MS 2869/10) — preserves only scattered numerals and a handful of legible signs from what was once a fuller accounting record. It is a tiny, damaged witness to one of the world's earliest writing systems being put to practical, everyday use.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken accounting tablet lists a series of entries, each pairing a quantity with a commodity or title. One line records a unit of something alongside an amount of salt. Another counts two units against the title of a builder or mason, and a further entry lists one unit against the office of a vizier or minister. Additional entries follow — quantities of five and forty-three units — but the commodities or titles they refer to are lost to breaks in the clay. As with most such tablets, this is a bare bookkeeping record, not a narrative text, and much of it no longer survives.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N57) salt (MUN) 2(N01) , builder/mason (ŠIDIM) [...] 1(N01) , vizier/minister (SUKKAL) [...] 1(N01) , [sign undetermined] [...] 5(N01) [...] , [...] 3(N14) [sign undetermined] [...] , [...]
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
[...] 1(N01)# , [...] 1(N57) MUN~a1 2(N01) , SZIDIM# [...] 1(N01) , SUKKAL# [...] 1(N01) , X [...] 5(N01)# [...] , [...] 3(N14)# X [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2869/09 + MS 2869/10. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006207) — 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.