Position in chronology
MS 2782/04
About this tablet
This is a small, badly damaged clay tablet fragment from the proto-cuneiform administrative corpus of Uruk-period southern Mesopotamia (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), reportedly from the Umma area. It is a livestock and grain tally: an accountant recorded counts of she-goats and ewes alongside what looks like a barley-related notation, using the earliest known number-and-word writing system. Tablets like this are the very first written records of institutional bookkeeping — herders' and temple stewards' inventories rather than literature or law.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The front of this tablet is too broken to read in full — a few scattered signs survive, including what looks like a grain entry, but the surrounding text is lost. Where the numbers are legible, the tablet is tallying livestock: seventeen she-goats in one entry, eight ewes in the next, and a further count — perhaps thirteen — of an unspecified type in a third, badly damaged line. The rest of the tablet, including whatever total or heading once framed these figures, has not survived.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse, broken) [...], [...] [...], [...] |ŠE~a.NAM₂|# [...], [...] (Numerical/livestock entries, reverse or lower obverse) 1(N14) 7(N01) — she-goats (UD₅~a) 8(N01) — ewes (U₈)#? 1(N14)# [...] 3(N01)# — [...] [...], [...]
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
[...] , [...] , [...] |SZE~a.NAM2|# [...] , [...] 1(N14) 7(N01) , UD5~a 8(N01) , U8#? 1(N14)# [...] 3(N01)# , [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/04. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006124) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.