Position in chronology
MS 2782/04
About this tablet
A fragment of one of the world's oldest kinds of documents: a proto-cuneiform administrative account from the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), possibly from Umma in southern Iraq. Writing here is not yet a full script — it is a bookkeeping system of numeral impressions and word-signs. The surviving entries count small livestock (17 she-goats, 8 ewes) alongside a grain entry, the everyday stock-taking of an early urban institution, written centuries before connected sentences could be recorded.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an inventory sheet. The opening entries are broken, but one line recorded a quantity of barley under an administrative category we can no longer pin down. Then comes the livestock: seventeen she-goats and eight ewes, tallied with the round and wedge-shaped number marks of the earliest accounting. A further line counted at least thirteen of something — ten-plus-three, with the middle of the figure and the commodity itself lost in the break. The rest of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] , [...] 2. , [...] ŠE.NAM2 (grain, of the NAM2-category) [...] 3. [...] , [...] 4. 1(N14) 7(N01) (= 17) , she-goats 5. 8(N01) (= 8) , ewes(?) 6. 1(N14) (= 10) [+ ...] 3(N01) (= 3) , [entry lost] 7. , [...]
Our translation engine — Fable 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-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-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.