Position in chronology
MS 2782/12
About this tablet
A small fragment of one of the world's earliest written documents, from the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), possibly from Umma in southern Iraq. It is a piece of an administrative account: numbered entries tallying goods or deliveries, each line pairing a quantity with a commodity or an institution such as a storehouse. Too little survives to say what was being counted, but the fragment shows bookkeeping — not literature — at the very birth of writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a scrap of an ancient ledger. What remains are the stubs of at least six entries: one of something now lost; one of a commodity written with the sign NIM; two of something qualified as 'black'; an entry mentioning the sign AN, whose role here is unclear; and one item connected with a house or storehouse. The last line and everything around the edges of the fragment are broken away, so the totals, the goods, and the people involved are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] 1 (unit) ... [...] 2. 1 (unit), NIM ... [...] 3. [...] 2 (units), black ... [...] 4. [...] ... AN ... [...] 5. 1 (unit), the house/storehouse(?) ... [...] 6. [...] ... [...] (rest of the fragment broken; the reverse is uninscribed as photographed)
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
[...] 1(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01) , NIM~b2# [...] [...] 2(N01)# , GI6# A [...] [...] , AN [...] 1(N01) , E2~b#? X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/12. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006132) — 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.