Position in chronology
MS 2863/27
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the very dawn of writing — the Uruk period, roughly the late fourth millennium BCE, probably from the southern Mesopotamian city of Umma. It is an administrative record: a scribe used simple numeral marks alongside pictographic signs to track quantities of goods, workers, or transactions — perhaps rations, labor, or a purchase involving salt. Almost none of the individual entries survive complete enough to reconstruct the full transaction, but the tablet is a physical fragment of the earliest bureaucratic bookkeeping system ever developed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary accounting tablet from one of the earliest writing systems in the world. What survives are a handful of tally entries, each pairing a small number with a word or category: one entry may record a batch of dependent workers or people from the Subir region, another seems to record a 'purchase' of seven units of something, another notes '1' associated with a household or institution and a place-name marker. The tablet breaks off, and the reverse continues with more numbered entries — quantities of two, then more damaged signs, ending in a mention of what might be salt. Too much is missing to say exactly what was being counted or exchanged.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [...] 1(N01), ...... [...] 1(N01), dependent-workers/Šubur(-people) — RAD(sign, damaged) [...] 7(N01), purchase/exchange(?) 1(N01), house/institution(E2) — KI(place/locative, damaged) [...] (Reverse, following break) [...] 2(N01), [...] 2(N01), [...] 2(N01), ...... [...] 1(N01) [...], [...] [...], [...] AL(sign, damaged) 2(N57), salt(?) [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[...] 1(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01) , SZUBUR RAD~a# 7(N01) , SZAM2#? 1(N01) , E2~b# KI# [...] 2(N01)# , [...] 2(N01)# , [...] 2(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] AL# 2(N57) MUN~a1# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2863/27. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006193) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
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