Position in chronology
MS 2900/19
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the very earliest forms of writing, found in the Schøyen Collection and said to come from the Umma region of southern Iraq. It appears to be an administrative account — a tally of items such as plow-teams, a bird, sheep, and possibly oil or foodstuffs, each counted with the simple numeral wedges used before true cuneiform script existed. Because so little of the tablet survives, we can only recover fragments of a longer record that once tracked agricultural labor, livestock, or rations under some institution's oversight — the connecting narrative and totals 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 is a set of tally entries, not a connected sentence: 'one [something], one plow-team, two plow-teams and [something], one entry involving a sky/divine sign and a bird, one sheep and two more unclear items, one unit of oil(?) and another commodity.' Then more numbers and terms are lost to breaks, until a final legible entry reads roughly 'a mixed(?) plow-team, disbursed.' The tablet is a scrap of an ancient counting record — probably tracking plow-teams, animals, and goods issued or received by some office — but so much of it is broken away that only isolated line-items, not the full accounting, can be read today.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X 1(N01) [numeral 'one'] , X [sign(s) illegible] , plow(-team) [APIN] 2(N01) [numeral 'two'] , plow(-team) [APIN] X [sign illegible] 1(N01) [numeral 'one'] , AN [sky/divine marker?] bird [MUŠEN] A [sign, uncertain] 1(N01) [numeral 'one'] , sheep [UDU] X X [signs illegible] 1(N01) [numeral 'one'] , NI [oil/fat?] X SA [sign, commodity?] , [...] [...] 2(N01) [numeral 'two'] , [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01) [numeral 'one'] , [...] , HI [qualifier, 'mixed'?] plow(-team) [APIN] BA [disbursed/allotted] , [...] [...] , [...]
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 1(N01)# , X , APIN~a# 2(N01)# , APIN~a# X 1(N01)# , AN# MUSZEN# A 1(N01) , UDU~a X X 1(N01) , NI~a X SA~c# , [...] [...] 2(N01)# , [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , [...] , HI APIN~a BA# , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/19. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006227) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.