Position in chronology
MS 2869/06
About this tablet
A tiny proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records small numbers of animals — she-goats, rams, and ewes — under institutional or settlement headings, the kind of livestock tally that early Mesopotamian temple administrators kept to track herds and rations. It is one of the oldest types of writing in human history: not literature, not law, but the simple bureaucratic need to count things accurately. The tablet is badly damaged, with most lines broken, but enough survives to confirm its character as an early animal-accounting document.
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 count: one ewe, three rams, two animals of a particular quality or grade, and fragments of further entries that are now too broken to read. A place or institutional category ('settlement' / 'persons') appears as a heading above the surviving numbers. The upper portion of the tablet is almost entirely lost. This is the kind of record a temple storekeeper might make today on a spreadsheet — a running tally of animals received or allocated, noted down in the world's earliest writing system.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...]\n[...] [...] she-goat(?)\n[...] [...] ram\n[...] [...]\n[...] 1 [...] X\n— settlement(?) / person-category\n1 — ewe(?)\n3 — ram(s)\n2 — [NUN~b: quality/type marker?]\n[...] 1 [...]\n[...] [...]\n[...] [...]\n[...] [...]\n[...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] UD5~a# [...] , [...] UDUNITA~a# [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , [...] X , URU~a1# LU2 1(N01) , UTUA~a 3(N01) , UDUNITA~a 2(N01)# , NUN~b [...] 1(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2869/06. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006204) — 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.