Position in chronology
MS 2900/17
About this tablet
This is a tiny, badly broken fragment of a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period, likely from Umma in southern Iraq — among the very earliest writing anywhere, dating to roughly 3200 BCE. The tablet was divided into ruled cases (boxes), each holding a short numerical entry alongside a commodity or personnel sign; here we can only make out traces of numbers, a possible garment sign, and a sign later read as 'workers/men.' It probably once recorded quantities of cloth and labor allotted or accounted for by an early institution, but almost all of the entries are lost to breakage.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is just scattered fragments of an accounting record. In the ruled boxes that remain, we can make out a note about cloth or garments, another about a group of workers or men, and two numeric entries — one marked with the numeral 1 next to an illegible sign, another with the numeral 2 next to a measure-sign (BAN). Everything else — what was counted, who received it, and the surrounding context — is missing where the tablet has broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] (illegible sign) [...] , [...] cloth/garment (TUG₂) [...] , [...] (illegible sign), workers/men (ERIM) [...] , [...] (broken) [...] 1 (unit) , [...] (illegible sign) 2 (unit) , BAN-measure [...] , [...] (broken) [...] , [...] (broken) [...] , [...] (broken)
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 [...] , [...] TUG2~a [...] , [...] X ERIM~a [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , [...] X 2(N01) , BAN~b [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/17. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006225) — 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.