Position in chronology
MS 2900/28
About this tablet
A tiny, heavily damaged administrative tablet from the late Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), likely originating from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It appears to record small quantities — ones and twos — of commodities or persons, possibly female workers (SAL) and plow-related entries (APIN), in the proto-cuneiform accounting system that preceded true writing. Tablets like this are among the very earliest written documents in human history: not literature, but institutional bookkeeping — the world's first paperwork. Even in its broken state, it illustrates the moment when administrators invented writing to track goods and labor.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too damaged to read as a continuous record, but what survives shows a list of small numbers — mostly ones and twos — set against categories that appear to include female workers or women, a plow or plow-related activity, and a foot or delivery notation. Most of the entries are broken away. The surviving portion seems to be part of an institutional account tracking quantities of people or commodities under specific labor or agricultural headings.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] 2 , X SAL [...] 1 , [ZATU628~b] [...] 1 , [...] 1 , [...] [...] , [...] , APIN~a GIR3~c ZATU839 [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] 2(N01) , X SAL [...] 1(N01) , ZATU628~b# [...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...] , APIN~a# GIR3~c@g# ZATU839# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/28. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006236) — 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.