Position in chronology
MS 2681
About this tablet
This is one of the oldest written documents in human history — a small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), likely from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It is a livestock account, recording counts of ewes, goats, and oxen under what appear to be official or institutional headings. Tablets like this represent the very birth of writing: not literature or religion, but the practical need to track animals and commodities across a complex urban economy. The signs are still largely pictographic — recognizable pictures of animals pressed into wet clay — before cuneiform became fully abstract.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records a count of animals: 2 ewes; 28 of some damaged or unclear category; 5 goats; 1 ox — and then a second entry of 1 ox associated with what may be a fuel or fire commodity. Several lines are too broken or damaged to read. The reverse side preserves only faint traces. This is a simple inventory, the kind a temple or household administrator would draw up to track livestock on a given day.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 ewes 28 [broken commodity/animal sign] [...] [...] 5 goats 1 ox [...] [...] [...] 1 ox — [fuel/fire commodity?] [blank or lost line] [...] [unread sign]
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) , U8# 2(N14) 8(N01) , X [...] [...] 5(N01) , MASZ2 1(N01) , GU4# , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01) , GU4# NE~a , , [...] X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2681. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006102) — 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.