Position in chronology
MS 2677
About this tablet
This is one of the earliest administrative records in human history, dating to the Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), probably from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It is a small, badly damaged clay tablet — possibly an institutional ration or commodity-distribution list — recording quantities (using the most basic numerical notation, single round impressions) of beer or liquid rations, reeds, workers, and various institutional goods against office-holders or locations. Such tablets are the very beginning of writing: not literature, not law, but the bookkeeping of a large temple or palace economy. The signs are proto-cuneiform, the immediate ancestors of the Sumerian script, and even specialist scholars can only partially decode their meaning.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries record distributions of goods under an EN official: three units of beer (or liquid ration) with something left over; one large vessel or implement; one item associated with the courtyard; one allocation for the labor force; reeds and related commodities; and what may be a container destined for a high-ranking official, possibly with a clay/tablet reference. The first and last lines are too broken to read, and several signs remain unidentified.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] EN, [quality/breed marker] NUN [...] [...] X X [...] 3, [remainder:] beer/liquid ration [...] [...] 1, large [item/animal — GAL] + SZITA [vessel/implement?] 1, horn(s) [of] courtyard 1, [labor force / workers] ERIN [...] reed, SZUBUR, [commodity/measure] [...] container, [destination:] NUN, clay/tablet? [...] [...] [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] EN~a# A@t NUN~a [...] , [...] X X [...] 3(N01)# , SZA TAK4~a KASZ~c [...] , [...] 1(N01) , GAL~a SZITA~a1? 1(N01) , SI KISAL~b1 1(N01) , ERIN , GI SZUBUR USZ~a# [...] , GA2~a2 SZE3 NUN~a# IM~a#? [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2677. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006098) — 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.
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.