Position in chronology
MS 2900/34
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay fragment from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), one of the very earliest phases of writing, from the Umma area in southern Iraq. What survives are scattered administrative notations — numerals paired with commodity or personnel signs (an ox, beer, a she-goat, a 'head-count' term) — typical of the earliest bookkeeping records that tracked rations, livestock, or labor for an institution such as a temple or storehouse. So little of the tablet survives that we cannot reconstruct the actual transaction it recorded; it is a fragment of an accounting document rather than a connected text.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken tablet preserves only scraps of an ancient account. One line seems to list a quantity of one unit alongside references to an ox, beer, and something described as 'contents' or 'interior' — perhaps a store or ration entry. Another line mentions something being 'brought' or 'delivered,' possibly involving oil. A further line gives '1 unit' next to a term that may mean 'total in hand' associated with a sign read as AN, and the last surviving line may mention a she-goat. The rest of the tablet — beginning, most of the middle, and the end — is too damaged or missing to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [...] , [...] 2. [...] 1(N01) , GI6 GU4 KASZ(?) ŠA3 — "[...], 1 unit: night/black(?), ox, beer(?), interior/contents" 3. [...] , [...] DU NI — "[...], ..., brought/delivered, oil(?)" 4. [...] , [...] X — "[...], ..., [illegible sign]" 5. 1(N01) , SAGSZU AN — "1 unit: total-in-hand(?) of AN" 6. [...] , [...] 7. [...] , [...] UD5(?) [...] — "[...], ..., she-goat(?), [...]"
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
[...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , GI6 GU4# KASZ~b#? SZA3~a1 [...] , [...] DU@g# NI~a [...] , [...] X 1(N01) , SAGSZU AN [...] , [...] [...] , [...] UD5~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/34. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006242) — 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.