Position in chronology
MS 2782/13
About this tablet
This is a tiny, badly broken clay fragment from the Uruk period (roughly the late fourth millennium BCE), one of the very earliest writing systems in the world — proto-cuneiform, used at sites like Umma in southern Iraq for institutional bookkeeping. What survives are isolated signs from what was once a multi-line administrative tally: a numeral, a possible reference to an official (sanga, a temple administrator), a sign conventionally read as 'egg' or a similar commodity, and a closing notation that may name a city or institution. Because so little of the tablet remains, we can only see fragments of an accounting record, not the full transaction it once described.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only scattered pieces of this ancient inventory record survive. One line seems to mention an official called the sanga, a kind of temple manager, alongside a sign usually meaning 'egg' or a similar item. Another line records the number 3 next to a small quantity of some oil-or-fat-type good. A final line may reference a city or settlement, but almost everything else — the commodities being counted, the amounts, and the people involved — is lost to breakage. What remains is a mere skeleton of what was once a working list of goods or rations.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Line 1) [...] , [...] X (Line 2) [...] , [...] NUNUZ (egg/roe) SANGA (temple administrator?) (Line 3) [...] , [...] X (Line 4) 3(N01) , [...] X NI TUR (small quantity of NI/oil-fat commodity?) (Line 5) [...] , [...] (Line 6) [...] , [...] URU (city/settlement)
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
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] NUNUZ~a0 SANGA~a#? [...] , [...] X 3(N01)# , [...] X NI~a TUR# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] URU~a1
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/13. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006133) — 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.