Position in chronology
MS 2900/23
About this tablet
This is a tiny, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), possibly from the site of Umma in southern Iraq. It is a fragmentary administrative record — the kind of accounting document that early Sumerian scribes used to track distributions of commodities such as beer, grain, or tools. The surviving entries seem to record small quantities (using the basic numerical unit N01) alongside signs for beer and possibly a vessel or container type. Tablets like this are among the very earliest written documents in human history, produced when writing was invented specifically to manage temple and institutional economies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a short administrative list, most of it broken away. A few entries can still be made out: one unit of something involving a mouth-sign and beer, two units of beer with a vessel marker, two units of something labeled with the sky/AN sign, and scattered traces of other entries now too damaged to read. The rest of the tablet — top, bottom, and both sides — is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [lance/spear sign?] SI[?] [...] , X SAG-ŠU[?] [...] , [...] AL[?] [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)[?] , ŠU[?] X 1(N01) , KA~a beer MA 2(N01) , beer MA [...] 2(N01) , AN [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , SZITA~a1#? SI# [...] , X SAGSZU# [...] , [...] AL# [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , SZU# X 1(N01) , KA~a KASZ~c# MA 2(N01) , KASZ~c# MA# [...] 2(N01) , AN# [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/23. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006231) — 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.