MS 2863/10

~3100 BCE·Uruk Period·P006176

About this tablet

This is one of the oldest types of written documents in human history — a small administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), likely from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records quantities of animals — sheep, goats — and probably grain allocations, the kind of routine accounting that drove the invention of writing itself. The tablet is fragmentary and partially broken, but the surviving entries are a direct window into the earliest bureaucratic record-keeping. It belongs to a private Norwegian collection and was probably excavated in the late twentieth century from illegal or uncontrolled digging.

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

Written in modern English

What survives of this tablet is a livestock and goods tally. Entries record: 1 unit associated with an oven or kiln; 17 units of one category; 7 units of another oven-related item; 9 goats; a grain-allocation entry; 3 sheep; and a large quantity — 51 higher-order units — linked to a tablet or record. The last legible line notes 3 portions marked as distributed shares or half-portions. Several lines at the top and middle are too broken to read.

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

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

[...] [...] [...] 1 (unit), UTUA (oven/kiln?) 1(N14) 7(N01) (= 17 units), NUN~b (a quality/category marker?) 7 (units), UDUNITA~a (oven/furnace unit?) 9 (units) [uncertain], MASZ2 (goats) [blank / sub-total line], |SZE~a.NAM2| [grain allocation?] 3 (units), UDU~a (sheep) [blank] 5(N14) 1(N01) (= 51 large units), [...] LAGAB~a DUB~a [uncertain] [...] [...] X 3 (units), BAR (half-portions / disbursed share)

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

Transliteration

[...] , [...]
[...] 1(N01)# , UTUA~a
1(N14) 7(N01) , NUN~b
7(N01) , UDUNITA~a
9(N01)# , MASZ2
, |SZE~a.NAM2|#
3(N01) , UDU~a
,
5(N14) 1(N01) , [...] LAGAB~a# DUB~a
[...] , [...] X
3(N01) , BAR

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/10. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).

Attribution

Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006176) — 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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