Position in chronology
MS 2900/31
About this tablet
A tiny, heavily fragmented administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), almost certainly an accounting record. It appears to tally small quantities of goods — possibly salt — under named officials or categories, using the earliest known numerical notation system. Tablets like this are among the oldest written documents in human history, produced by temple administrators in southern Mesopotamia to track the flow of commodities. Despite its damaged state, this fragment is a genuine relic of the very birth of writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a list of quantities: three separate entries each recording a single unit of something (the commodity is lost), followed by a partially legible line recording a larger amount — one higher-order unit and three basic units — alongside what may be a title or category marker and a reference to salt. The rest of each line is broken away or illegible. This is the kind of running tally a temple accountant would keep track of supplies on a daily or monthly basis.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 1(N01) [...] [...] 1(N01) [...] [...] 1(N01) [...] [...] [...] 1(N14) 3(N01) [...] PAP~a X X MUN~a [...] [...]
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(N01)# [...] , [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...] [...] 1(N14)# 3(N01)# , [...] PAP~a X X MUN~a1# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/31. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006239) — 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.