Position in chronology
MS 2680
About this tablet
This is a very small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), likely from the Umma region of southern Iraq. It records quantities of animals — probably goats and sheep — alongside numerical notations and what may be a grain (barley) disbursement entry. Tablets like this are among the earliest written documents in human history: not literature or royal proclamation, but the unglamorous paperwork of a temple or household economy. The fact that writing was invented for exactly this kind of livestock-and-commodity accounting, rather than for stories or laws, makes even a damaged scrap like this historically significant.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too broken to read as a continuous account, but what survives is a tally of animals and commodities: two goats here, one or two further entries of uncertain goods, and then a larger quantity — recorded in the big N34 units — linked to what looks like a barley disbursement. Another entry records at least two large units plus six smaller ones against sheep. The rest is too damaged or lost to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 2, NUN~b# [...] [...] 2, goat(s) 1, X [...] 1, X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N34) , [...] X BA ŠE~a X [...] 2(N34) 6(N01)# [...] , sheep [...] [...] , [...] X
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] 2(N01)# , NUN~b# [...] [...] 2(N01)# , MASZ2# 1(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01)# , X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N34) , [...] X BA SZE~a X [...] 2(N34)# 6(N01)# [...] , UDU~a# [...] [...] , [...] X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2680. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006101) — 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.