Position in chronology
MS 2900/36
About this tablet
This tiny, heavily damaged clay tablet from the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE — is one of the earliest administrative records in human history, predating what most people would recognise as 'writing.' It appears to record quantities of commodities or vessels, probably for a temple or storage institution, using the simple round-impression numerals that were the precursor to Sumerian cuneiform. The tablet is so fragmentary and the signs so worn that most entries cannot be read with confidence, but the presence of basic numeral impressions alongside sign variants for vessels and possibly field-enclosures places it firmly within the proto-cuneiform accounting tradition of southern Iraq. These tiny tokens of ancient bookkeeping — barely the size of a pebble — are the direct ancestors of all writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Most of this tiny record is too damaged to read. What survives shows a short list, probably of vessels or commodities, each preceded by the number '1.' Three entries near the top may reference fields or enclosures of some kind, though the signs are uncertain. The middle section records what appears to be a single vessel of a specific type, and the surrounding lines each carry a count of one unit next to signs that can no longer be identified. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] field/enclosure? [...] , [...] field/enclosure? [...] , [...] field/enclosure? 1(N01)[?] , [...] X 1(N01) , vessel (DUG~b type)[?] [...] 1(N01)[?] , X [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] GAN~c#? [...] , [...] GAN~c#? [...] , [...] GAN~c#? 1(N01)# , [...] X 1(N01) , |DUG~bxX|# [...] 1(N01)# , X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/36. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006244) — 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.