Position in chronology
MS 2869/03
About this tablet
This is a small, badly worn clay tag or cone-shaped tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3100 BCE), one of humanity's earliest writing systems, found at or associated with Umma in southern Iraq. It appears to be a fragmentary administrative list recording quantities of commodities — barley, fodder, fish, and possibly goats — issued to or associated with categories of workers, kept by a storehouse official. Such texts are the accounting backbone of the first cities, tracking the flow of food and labor long before any king or scribe left a name behind; because the script is still pictographic and the tablet itself is eroded, much of the precise meaning remains genuinely uncertain to modern scholars.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary storehouse account. What survives records a storeroom's holdings of barley and fodder plant, followed by an entry noting a quantity of '1' linked to workers and something associated with lions (perhaps a lion-skin or lion-related item), then another '1' tied to fish, workers, and goats. A further line repeats workers alongside the lion-item. The next two lines are broken away entirely. The tablet ends with a mention of goats and a place or location marker, but the text breaks off before more can be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , storehouse (GA₂): barley, fodder-plant [...] 1(N01) , AN, workers (ERIM), lion(-product) (PIRIG) [...] 1(N01) , fish (KU₆), workers (ERIM), goat/interest (MAŠ) [...] , workers (ERIM), lion(-product) (PIRIG) [...] , [...] [...] , [...] , goat/interest (MAŠ), place/KI [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] , GA2~a2# SZE3# U2~b# [...] 1(N01)# , AN ERIM~a PIRIG~b1 [...] 1(N01)# , KU6~a ERIM~a MASZ# [...] , ERIM~a PIRIG~b1 [...] , [...] [...] , [...] , MASZ KI [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2869/03. 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 (P006201) — 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.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.