Position in chronology
MS 3884
About this tablet
This is a small, badly damaged administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), likely from the Umma region. Its surviving fragments are laid out in the typical case-and-entry format of the earliest bureaucratic texts: numeral signs, commodity or personnel markers, and what appears to be a reference to a 'temple administrator' (sanga) and a 'cattle-pen' or byre, alongside a possible mention of dependent workers or people from the Subir region. Tablets like this are among humanity's first written records — not literature but bookkeeping, tracking goods, labor, or livestock under officials of an early temple or palace economy. Because so little of the surface survives, the exact transaction it recorded cannot be reconstructed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What's left of this tablet is a series of accounting entries, most of them too broken to read. A few lines still show numbers next to what look like commodity or personnel notations — one entry seems to mention workers described elsewhere as dependent laborers or people from the Subir region, another line pairs a 'cattle-pen,' a 'woman,' and a 'temple administrator,' suggesting some kind of livestock or personnel record tied to a temple official. Near the end, a numeral is followed by a term that likely means something was 'disbursed' or 'allotted.' The rest of the tablet — the beginnings and ends of nearly every line — is lost to breakage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Column/Case entries, obverse — badly broken) [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] SZUBUR (dependent workers / people of Subir?) [...] , [...] KU~b1 X [...] , [...] 1(N34) , X X 1(N34) , X DUB~a X (tablet/record-marker?) 2(N34) , cattle-pen (TUR3~a) — woman(SAL) — temple-administrator (SANGA~a) 2(N14) [...] , IB~a [...] , [...] , [...] [...] 1(N34) 1(N14) , BA [...] (disbursed/allotted ...)
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] SZUBUR# [...] , [...] KU~b1# X [...] , [...] 1(N34) , X X 1(N34)# , X DUB~a# X 2(N34) , TUR3~a SAL SANGA~a 2(N14)# [...] , IB~a [...] , [...] , [...] [...] 1(N34)# 1(N14) , BA# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 3884. 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 (P006276) — 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.