Position in chronology
MS 2782/12
About this tablet
This is a tiny, badly broken fragment of a proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period, likely from the Umma region. What survives is a bare list of numbered entries — quantities of '1' and '2' followed by sign-groups that may denote commodities, persons, or institutions — the kind of terse bookkeeping used by the earliest literate administrators of Mesopotamia to track goods, rations, or labor, roughly 5,000 years ago. So little of the tablet survives that its exact subject cannot be recovered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What remains is a scrap of an ancient inventory list. It records a series of small numbered entries — one unit of something, then another unit of something else, then two units of something — each followed by a sign or short sign-group that probably named a commodity, an official, or a place, but the tablet is broken before or after nearly every entry, so we cannot say what was actually being counted. The rest of the text, including whatever total or heading it once had, is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N01), X [...] 1(N01), NIM(?) [...] [...] 2(N01), GI6 A [...] [...], AN [...] 1(N01), E2(?) X [...] [...], [...]
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
[...] 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-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.