Position in chronology
MS 2863/21
About this tablet
This tiny, heavily damaged clay tablet fragment dates to the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE) and belongs among the oldest written records in human history. It is an administrative accounting document — the kind that temple or palace officials used to track quantities of commodities and persons. The surviving signs record small numerical entries (ones and what may be twenties) against commodity or personnel categories, including what may be workers or persons (LU2) and possibly a vessel or container type (MAR~a). Too fragmentary to reconstruct a complete transaction, it nonetheless represents the very birth of writing as a tool of economic management in ancient Mesopotamia.
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 list of small quantities assigned to various goods or people: one unit of something recorded as MAR~a I, one unit of SZIR~b NI~a, a quantity of two against something called NUN~b, one unit against UDUNITA~a, and what look like summary or total lines marked KISZ — perhaps running totals of 20 and 2 units respectively. The rest of the text is too broken to read. It is, essentially, a partial ledger entry — numbers matched to commodity categories — with most of the context lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] SI# LU2 1(N01) , MAR~a I 1(N01) , SZIR~b NI~a [...] [...] X AN [...] [...] [...] [...] 2(N01)# , NUN~b [...] 1(N01)# , UDUNITA~a# [...] [...] KISZ# [...] [...] KISZ# [...] 2(N14)# , [...] [...] 2(N01)# , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] SI# LU2 1(N01) , MAR~a I 1(N01) , SZIR~b NI~a [...] , [...] X AN [...] , [...] , [...] [...] 2(N01)# , NUN~b [...] 1(N01)# , UDUNITA~a# [...] , [...] KISZ# [...] , [...] KISZ# [...] 2(N14)# , [...] [...] 2(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/21. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006187) — 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.