Position in chronology
MS 2900/36
About this tablet
This is a tiny, badly broken clay fragment — really just a chip of a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet — from the Uruk period, likely from Umma. What survives suggests a tally of field-plots (using the GAN2 area sign) and containers or jars (DUG signs) counted with simple numeral notation, the kind of bookkeeping scribes kept for land or produce around 3200–3000 BCE. Almost every line is broken at both ends, so the specific transaction — who owned the fields, what was stored in the jars — cannot be recovered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a small accounting note, so damaged that only fragments of it survive. The first few lines seem to record areas of land, measured in a standard field unit, but the details on either side are lost. Later lines count out single units — one of something followed by a jar or vessel notation — but again the surrounding words are broken away. The final line is missing entirely. In short: a scrap of a ledger tracking land and containers, with almost nothing left to say what it was actually for.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Line 1) [...], [...] GAN₂ (field-area unit)? (broken) (Line 2) [...], [...] GAN₂ (field-area unit)? (broken) (Line 3) [...], [...] GAN₂ (field-area unit)? (broken) (Line 4) 1(N01) [one unit], [...] X (sign broken/illegible) (Line 5) 1(N01), DUG~b×X (a jar-sign compound, vessel type uncertain) [...] (Line 6) 1(N01)?, X (sign broken/illegible) [...] (Line 7) [...], [...] (entirely broken)
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
[...] , [...] GAN~c#? [...] , [...] GAN~c#? [...] , [...] GAN~c#? 1(N01)# , [...] X 1(N01) , |DUG~bxX|# [...] 1(N01)# , X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/36. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006244) — 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.