Position in chronology
MS 3882
About this tablet
A severely damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), tentatively attributed to the site of Umma in southern Iraq and now held in the Schøyen Collection, Oslo. It appears to record commodity allocations or ration entries — the kind of accountancy that represents the very birth of writing itself. The sign SAL ('woman' or 'female worker') appears at least twice, suggesting some entries may track female workers or female-category recipients within a redistributive economy. The tablet is too fragmentary to reconstruct a complete transaction, but even its broken state is historically significant: this is among the oldest form of writing humans ever produced.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Most of this tablet is lost or too damaged to read. What survives shows a series of numerical entries paired with commodity or person categories. At least one entry records a quantity against the sign for 'woman' or 'female worker.' One line preserves a larger composite number — involving units that in this system may represent dozens or hundreds of a given good — but the commodity itself has broken away. The overall picture is a ledger of some kind: goods or rations distributed, perhaps to female workers, in a temple or palace storehouse. The rest is gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [...] (sign uncertain) [...] , [...] [...] , [...] (sign uncertain) [...] , [...] (sign uncertain) [...] , SAL[?] (sign uncertain) [...] 1(N14)[?] , SAL (sign uncertain) [...] [...] , [...] 1(N48)[?] 3(N34) 5(N14)[?] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] (signs uncertain) (signs uncertain)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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-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.