Position in chronology
CDLI Lexical 000002, ex. 183
About this tablet
This tiny clay fragment — catalog number MS 2863/15 in the Schøyen Collection, Oslo — is one of hundreds of surviving copies of a standard Early Dynastic lexical list, likely compiled at or near ancient Umma in southern Iraq around 3000–2600 BCE. Lexical lists like this one were school texts: scribes in training copied standardized columns of signs and sign-combinations, building up a shared repertoire of writing. The tablet records a numbered series of sign groups, each preceded by a single tally stroke, with a larger total count of 41 (or similar) appearing at the bottom — the bookkeeping format of institutional record-keeping applied to the teaching of signs itself. It is a fragment of the oldest organized educational curriculum in human history.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Each line carries a single count mark followed by a sign or combination of signs: NAM2 DI, NAM2 NAM2, NAM2 PA RAD, AB ME, GAL with a compound numerical sign, EN — a running list of sign groups, one entry per stroke. Several lines are too broken to read. The tablet closes with a running total of forty-one (or close to it), followed by signs now lost. The rest is damaged beyond recovery.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[1] , [...]\n1 , [...] KAB[?]\n1 , NAM2 DI\n1 , NAM2 NAM2\n1 , [...]\n1 , NAM2 PA RAD\n1 , AB ME\n1 , GAL |N58.BAD|\n1 , EN [...]\n1 , [...]\n1 , [...]\n1 , [...]\n41 , X [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[1(N01)] , [...] 1(N01)# , [...] KAB# 1(N01) , NAM2 DI 1(N01) , NAM2 NAM2 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) , NAM2# PA~a# RAD~a# 1(N01) , AB~a# ME~a# 1(N01) , GAL~a |1(N58).BAD~a|# 1(N01) , EN~a# [...] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01)# , [...] 1(N01)# , [...] 4(N14)# 1(N01)# , X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CDLI Lexical 000002, ex. 183. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006181) — 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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Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
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