Position in chronology
CDLI Lexical 000002, ex. 194
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged proto-cuneiform tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), catalogued as MS 2429/5 in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo. It belongs to the 'Lexical 000002' series — one of the oldest standardised word lists in human history, copies of which were distributed across Mesopotamia as scribal teaching tools. Each line pairs a numerical tally mark (here always one unit) with a sign or sign compound drawn from an official vocabulary, most of them title or administrative terms clustering around NAM2 compounds. The tablet is too fragmentary and the signs too worn to reconstruct the full entry sequence, but its place in a widely attested Uruk-period lexical tradition is not in doubt.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Each entry on this tablet records a single unit followed by a term — mostly compounds built around NAM2 paired with other signs: DI, another NAM2, the city sign, barley, RAD and PA (likely an overseer title), and then KINGAL, GAL-TE, and SUKKAL. The final preserved line gives a total of 41 units followed by a broken sign. Think of it as a page from an official vocabulary primer: a scribe working through a canonical list of institutional titles and categories, one item per line, each counted as one entry. The last few lines and the closing total are too damaged to read fully.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N01) , NAM2 [variant] DI [variant] 1(N01) , NAM2 [variant] NAM2 [variant?] 1(N01) , NAM2 [variant] URU [city-sign variant] [1(N01)] , [...] NAM2 [variant] 1(N01) , barley(-sign) NAM2 [variant] 1(N01) , NAM2 [variant] RAD [variant] PA [overseer-sign] 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) , KINGAL 1(N01) , GAL [great/large] TE 1(N01) , SUKKAL [...] 41(N01) [N] , 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) , NAM2@t# DI@t 1(N01) , NAM2@t NAM2#? 1(N01) , NAM2@t URU~a1# [1(N01)] , [...] NAM2@t# 1(N01) , SZE~a# NAM2@t 1(N01) , NAM2@t RAD~a@t! PA~a 1(N01) , [...] 1(N01) , KINGAL 1(N01) , GAL~a TE 1(N01) , SUKKAL [...] 4(N14)# 1(N01)# [N] , X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CDLI Lexical 000002, ex. 194. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006046) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.
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.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.