Position in chronology
MS 2900/32
About this tablet
A tiny, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), most likely from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records some kind of economic transaction or inventory — quantities and goods under named categories — in the very earliest writing system humans ever used. Almost all of the entries are too broken or lost to read with confidence, but the surviving numerals and sign-groups are consistent with the administrative bookkeeping tablets that ancient Sumerian temples and households used to track commodities such as grain, livestock, or textiles. Its extreme smallness and fragmentary state make it one of the more elusive pieces in its collection.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only scattered entries survive on this badly broken tablet. One line records a single unit of something — the commodity is lost. Another line contains an unread or unidentified sign (ZATU628~a), possibly denoting a category, quality, or type of goods. Two further lines preserve the signs AB and TE and TUM, but their meaning in this context cannot be recovered. The rest of every line is either broken away or too worn to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X 1(N01)# [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , X [...] [...] , ZATU628~a# [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] AB~a# TE# [...] , [...] TUM~a [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X 1(N01)# [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , X [...] [...] , ZATU628~a# [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] AB~a# TE# [...] , [...] TUM~a [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/32. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006240) — 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.