Position in chronology
MS 2782/08
About this tablet
A small, badly worn fragment of one of the world's oldest written documents: a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), possibly from Umma in southern Iraq. It once recorded quantities of goods — one entry survives with the numeral '1' beside signs that may denote a bird and an oil or fat product, marked as 'distributed'. Texts like this were bookkeeping, not literature: they show writing at the moment of its invention, created to track commodities moving through an early urban economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a torn scrap of an inventory or disbursement ledger. The one readable entry says something like: 'One unit — a speckled bird(?) and an oil product — handed out.' Another line records a further commodity entry whose key signs can no longer be identified. Everything else — at least five more lines — is too broken or worn to read, and the back of the tablet carries no legible text, so we cannot tell how long the original account was or to whom the goods went.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] ... (traces of an illegible sign) 2. 1 (unit, N01): DAR (a 'variegated' item, perhaps a partridge-like bird), NI (oil/fat commodity?), DA (separator/adjacency marker) 3. — allotted/distributed (BA) 4. [...] ... DI ... RAD (entry of an undetermined commodity or official) 5. [...] ... (illegible sign) 6. [...] (line lost) 7. [...] (line lost) 8. ... [...] (traces only)
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
[...] , [...] X 1(N01) , DAR~a NI~a DA~a , BA [...] , [...] DI X RAD~a [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/08. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006128) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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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.