Position in chronology
MS 3882
About this tablet
This is a tiny, badly damaged fragment of a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), among the very earliest writing known. Its two-column layout of numbers and the recurring SAL ('woman/female') sign suggests it once recorded a count of goods, rations, or personnel — perhaps female laborers or animals — kept by an institution in or near Umma. Almost nothing of the original context survives; what remains is a handful of numeral notations and isolated signs surrounded by breaks.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is a short list, probably an accounting record, broken into short paired entries separated by a case-line. Most of the entries are too damaged to read at all. In the surviving fragments we can make out a count of '1' next to the sign for 'woman' or 'female' twice in a row, and further down a larger tally of quantities (1 of one measure, 3 of another, 5 of a third) attached to an entry that is now lost. The rest of the tablet — before, between, and after these numbers — is broken away, so we cannot say what commodity or person was actually being counted, only that someone in an early Mesopotamian institution was keeping a numerical record involving female workers or animals and quantities in at least three different counting units.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Line 1) [...] , [...] (Line 2) [...] , [...] (illegible sign) (Line 3) [...] , [...] (Line 4) [...] , [...] (illegible sign) (Line 5) [...] , [...] (illegible sign) (Line 6) [...] , SAL(female) (illegible sign) [...] (Line 7) 1(N14) , SAL(female) (illegible sign) [...] (Line 8) [...] , [...] (Line 9) 1(N48) 3(N34) 5(N14) [...] , [...] (Line 10) [...] , [...] (Line 11) [...] , [...] (illegible sign)(illegible sign)
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X [...] , SAL# X [...] 1(N14)# , SAL X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N48)# 3(N34) 5(N14)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 3882. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006274) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.