Position in chronology
MS 2997
About this tablet
This is one of the earliest written documents in human history — a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), likely originating from the region of Umma in southern Iraq. The signs are not yet a fully phonetic script; instead they are a set of pictographic and ideographic tokens used by temple or palace administrators to track commodities, institutions, and officials. The tablet records numerical entries — counts of goods or allocations against named categories, possibly including reed or plant products, an institutional building, and a high-status title-holder. Its survival in the Schøyen Collection makes it one of a small number of such very early tablets available for direct examination outside of excavation archives.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is a ledger of allocations or deliveries, too early for fully readable language. What survives reads roughly: one unit of [commodity] SI, fish/food(?), branch-sign, [for the] household; one unit of SI4, reed, [sign], AN, branch-sign; [something] for the land, branch-sign, BU; one unit of SI, enclosure-sign, AN, head, reed; [broken lines]; forty units of SI4, [for the] EN-official, RAD-sign [rest broken]. The middle section is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [EN~a] TE [...] , [...] 1 , SI KU~b1 PA~a E2~b 1 , SI4 GI IN~b AN PA~a [...] , KALAM~a PA~a BU~a 1 , SI LAGAB~a AN SAG GI [...] , [...] 40 , SI4 [EN~a] RAD~a [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] , SI4~f EN~a TE [...] , [...] 1(N01) , SI KU~b1 PA~a E2~b 1(N01) , SI4~f GI IN~b AN PA~a , KALAM~a PA~a BU~a 1(N01) , SI LAGAB~a AN SAG GI [...] , [...] 4(N14) , SI4~f EN~a RAD~a@g [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2997. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006254) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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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.