Position in chronology
MS 2900/17
About this tablet
A tiny, heavily fragmented administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably from the southern Mesopotamian city of Umma. The surviving signs record quantities of commodities — likely textiles and male laborers — alongside basic numerical notations. This is among the very earliest writing in human history: proto-cuneiform bookkeeping, not yet a fully readable language but a system of symbols used to track goods and workers in a large institutional economy. Even in its broken state, it testifies to the birth of literacy as an accounting tool.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives on this tiny tablet records small quantities of goods — including what appear to be garments or cloth and a group of male workers — with numerical counts of 1 and 2 units noted alongside them. Several entries are too damaged to read. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] garment/cloth [...] , [...] X male workers [...] , [...] [...] 1 unit , [...] X 2 units , BAN~b [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] TUG2~a [...] , [...] X ERIM~a [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , [...] X 2(N01) , BAN~b [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/17. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006225) — 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The earliest historical document in human history.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.