Position in chronology
MS 2900/29
About this tablet
A tiny, heavily fragmented accounting tablet from the Uruk period — among the very earliest written records in human history, dating to roughly 3200–3000 BCE. It comes most likely from Umma in southern Iraq and records small quantities of commodities (counted in the archaic round-impression numeral system) alongside signs that may refer to fish, oil, or another food product. The writing here is proto-cuneiform, the direct ancestor of later Sumerian script, at a stage when signs were still largely pictographic. Despite its broken state, this fragment is a witness to the very birth of writing as an administrative tool.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too damaged for a complete reading. What survives is a short list of quantities — mostly ones and twos — each paired with a commodity sign or name, some of which are too worn to identify. One entry appears to record a unit of something related to fish or food alongside a sign that may mean oil or fat. The rest of the entries are broken away, and the surrounding context is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N01) , KU~b1 NI~a [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01) , [...] 2(N01) , X [...] 1(N01) , X [...] 1(N01) [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N01) , KU~b1# NI~a# [...] , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , [...] 2(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/29. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006237) — 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.