Position in chronology
MS 2900/15
About this tablet
This is one of the oldest types of writing in human history — a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably originating from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records quantities of small livestock — ewes and she-goats — and possibly wool, the kind of routine inventory that the earliest Mesopotamian bureaucracies kept to track temple or institutional herds. Only a fragment survives, broken into several pieces, with most of the numerical entries and commodity labels lost. Even in its damaged state it is a remarkable document: these clay tablets represent the very birth of writing, invented not for literature or religion but for counting animals and goods.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving text is too fragmentary to read as a complete record, but what remains shows entries for ewes and she-goats, with numerical notations of 1 and 2 units, and possible references to wool and a receipt or allocation formula. Most of the tablet is broken away. The legible lines amount to a partial livestock tally — a few animals counted, a few commodities named — with the rest lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] wool? [...] , [...] (hand/receipt)? [...] , [...] , ewe , she-goat 1(N01) [...] , X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N01) [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] SIG2~b#? [...] , [...] SZU2#? [...] , [...] , U8# , UD5~a 1(N01)# [...] , X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N01)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/15. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006223) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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.