Position in chronology
MS 2900/32
About this tablet
This is a tiny, badly broken corner of a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), one of the earliest phases of writing in southern Mesopotamia. Only a handful of case-divisions, a single numeral notation, and a few isolated signs survive; the rest of the tablet — and with it the transaction it recorded — is lost. Such tablets typically tallied goods like livestock, grain, or labor assigned to institutions or officials, but this fragment is too small to say which.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a scrap of an ancient account tablet, so damaged that almost nothing connected can be read. One line preserves a single counted unit (the numeral '1'), and a few isolated signs — possibly naming a commodity, an enclosure or institution, and a delivery or transport term — appear scattered across the remaining case lines. Everything else — the quantities, the names of people or goods, and the overall subject of the record — has broken away and cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X 1(N01) [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , X [...] [...] , ZATU628 [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] AB TE [...] , [...] TUM [...] , [...]
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X 1(N01)# [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , X [...] [...] , ZATU628~a# [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] AB~a# TE# [...] , [...] TUM~a [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2900/32. 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 (P006240) — 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.