Position in chronology
MS 2782/09
About this tablet
This is a small fragment of a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period, one of humanity's earliest writing systems, used around 3200–3000 BCE at sites like Umma in southern Iraq. It is a tally or ledger, likely from a temple or institutional household, recording small numbers of counted goods — possibly foodstuffs, cloth, and animal or plant products — next to sign-groups that functioned as commodity or personnel classifiers. The tablet is badly broken, so most entries survive only as isolated numerals paired with partial or damaged signs, giving us a glimpse of bureaucratic record-keeping rather than a connected narrative.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken accounting tablet lists a series of short entries, each pairing a small quantity (mostly 1s, 2s, and one 6) with a commodity or category sign. The surviving entries seem to record: an uncertain item marked with the NI-sign; two units of an unidentified sign (ISZ); one unit connected to a 'foot' or delivery notation; one unit of fodder or plant material tied to another foot-sign variant; something involving a 'weighed-out' amount of cloth or garment; an entry involving fire or fuel; and further quantities (6, then 2) of items too damaged to identify. Near the end, a barley-related compound sign appears alongside the 'head' sign, suggesting a grain amount linked to a person or overseer. Much of the tablet — the very beginning, several middle lines, and the final line — is too broken to read, so this is only a partial account of what was almost certainly a fuller ledger of goods and quantities.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], [...] NI(?) [...], [...] 2 units, ISZ(?) 2 units(?), ... [...] [...], [...] 1 unit, GIR3 (foot/transport sign, damaged) 1 unit, U2 (fodder/plant, damaged) GIR3@g (variant) 2 units(?) [...], [...] NI(?) 1 unit, LA2 (deficit/weighed-out) TUG2 (garment/cloth?) 1 unit, NE (fire/fuel sign) [...] 6 units, ... [...] 2 units, ... [...] [...], [...] [...], [...] ŠE.NAM2 SAG (barley/grain-NAM2, 'head'/person sign) [...], [...]
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
[...] , [...] NI~a# [...] , [...] 2(N01) , ISZ~b? 2(N01)# , X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01)# , GIR3~c 1(N01) , U2~b GIR3@g~b 2(N01)# [...] , [...] NI~a#? 1(N01) , LA2 TUG2~a? 1(N01) , NE~a# [...] 6(N01)# , X [...] 2(N01)# , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] |SZE~a.NAM2|# SAG# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/09. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006129) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-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.