Position in chronology
MS 2900/15
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay fragment from the proto-cuneiform (Uruk-period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE) administrative corpus, found or attributed to Umma in southern Iraq. Only isolated signs survive — numerals, a possible 'wool' or 'received' term, and entries for 'ewe' and 'she-goat' — suggesting it once recorded a small livestock or wool account, one of the countless bookkeeping tablets that early Mesopotamian institutions used to track herds and textile raw material. Because so little of the surface remains, we can only glimpse fragments of a bureaucratic record rather than read a coherent transaction.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tiny, badly damaged scrap of an ancient accounting tablet — really just a handful of surviving marks. What we can make out includes a possible note about wool, a term that might mean 'received' or 'delivered,' and two animal entries: one ewe and one she-goat, each presumably counted with a small quantity. There are also a couple of number signs (one entry of '1,' another of '2') attached to items whose names are lost. Everything else — most of the tablet's content, and the case structure that would tie these entries into a coherent transaction — is broken away or illegible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Case) [...], [...] wool (SIG2~b?) (Case) [...], [...] received/into-the-hand-of (ŠU2?) (Case) [...], [...] (Case) [...], ewe (U8) (Case) [...], she-goat (UD5~a) (Case) 1(N01) [...], X (Case) [...], [...] (Case) [...], [...] (Case) 2(N01) [...], [...] (Case) [...], [...]
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
[...] , [...] SIG2~b#? [...] , [...] SZU2#? [...] , [...] , U8# , UD5~a 1(N01)# [...] , X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N01)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/15. 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 (P006223) — 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.