MS 2862/17

~3100 BCE·Uruk Period·P006164

About this tablet

A tiny, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform tablet from the late Uruk period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), possibly from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It is a fragment of an institutional accounting record — the kind of tally that temple or palace administrators kept to track small quantities of commodities such as foodstuffs, fish, oil, or vessels. The surviving entries each record a single unit ('1') paired with a commodity sign whose exact meaning is now uncertain. This kind of tablet is among the earliest writing in human history, and even in its broken state it testifies to the sophisticated administrative machinery of the first Mesopotamian city-states.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

What survives of this tiny tablet is a short accounting list. Each line records a single unit of some commodity — something involving a boat or container, something involving oil or fat and water, something involving fish, and a quantity apparently given or deposited somewhere. Several lines are too damaged or broken to read. The rest is lost.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

[...] , [...] [...] , [...] house(?) X [...] , [...] [...] , X AN roe/egg-sign 1 , vessel/boat(?) fat/oil(?) 1 , mouth/opening(?) water(?) [...] , [...] 1(?) , [...] given/dedicated(?) 1 , fat/oil(?) water(?) 1 , fish(?) sky/An [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]

Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.

Transliteration

[...] , [...]
[...] , [...] E2~a# X
[...] , [...]
[...] , X AN NUNUZ~a0
1(N01) , MAR~a NI~a
1(N01) , KA~a A
[...] , [...]
1(N01)# , [...] RU#
1(N01) , NI~a A
1(N01) , KU~b1 AN
[...] , [...]
[...] , [...]
[...] , [...]

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2862/17. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).

Attribution

Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006164) — 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

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