Position in chronology
MS 2693
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records quantities of animals — sheep and goats — and possibly wooden goods, in a format typical of the earliest known bureaucratic record-keeping on earth. This is proto-cuneiform writing, the very first stage of the cuneiform script, before signs had acquired fixed phonetic values. Even in its fragmentary state, it shows the same basic logic that would underpin Mesopotamian accounting for the next three thousand years: a number followed by a commodity.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records several commodity entries, most of them broken. What survives: a quantity of sheep; an entry involving a wood or timber sign paired with two uncertain qualifiers; the number 3 followed by an uncertain category (possibly a quality marker or institutional designation); and 2 goats. The final legible line carries an unreadable sign. The rest of the tablet is too damaged or broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] sheep [...] [...] DA~a NI~a wood/timber [...] [...] 3, NUN~b 2, goat(s) [sign unclear] [...] [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] UDU~a# [...] , [...] DA~a# NI~a GISZ3~b# [...] , [...] 3(N01) , NUN~b# 2(N01) , MASZ2# , X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2693. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006114) — 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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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.