Position in chronology
MS 2869/09 + MS 2869/10
About this tablet
A tiny, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably from the ancient city of Umma in southern Iraq. It appears to record small quantities of commodities or rations — including salt — distributed to or associated with named officials, among them a 'mason' and a 'vizier.' These are among the very earliest bureaucratic records ever made: temple administrators using impressed clay tokens and pictographic signs to track goods and personnel before anything we would recognize as full writing existed. Despite its fragmentary state, the tablet offers a rare glimpse of the specialized workforce and commodity management of one of humanity's first urban institutions.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The legible entries record: [a quantity, damaged] of salt; 2 units for the mason [rest of line missing]; 1 unit for the vizier [rest of line missing]; 1 unit for [an official whose sign is unread]; 5 units [rest lost]; and 3 large measures of [an unread commodity, rest lost]. Much of the tablet is too broken or eroded to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N01)[?], [...] 1(N57) salt 2(N01), builder/mason [SZIDIM] [...] 1(N01), vizier [SUKKAL] [...] 1(N01), [sign X] [...] 5(N01)[?] [...], [...] 3(N14)[?] [sign X] [...], [...]
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)# , [...] 1(N57) MUN~a1 2(N01) , SZIDIM# [...] 1(N01) , SUKKAL# [...] 1(N01) , X [...] 5(N01)# [...] , [...] 3(N14)# X [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2869/09 + MS 2869/10. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006207) — 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.