Position in chronology
MS 2782/13
About this tablet
A small broken corner of an accounting tablet from the very dawn of writing, the Uruk period (late 4th millennium BCE), probably from Umma in southern Iraq. It is not language in the full sense but proto-cuneiform bookkeeping: numbers and commodity signs boxed into ruled cases. What survives hints at entries involving a temple administrator, a quantity of three of something, possibly an oil or fat product, and a settlement — the paper trail of one of the world's first bureaucracies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only scraps of this ledger survive. One entry seems to record eggs (or a similar product) under the authority of a temple administrator. Another counts three units of something now unreadable, qualified as a small measure of what may be oil or fat. A final legible entry mentions a settlement or city — perhaps where the goods came from or were headed. Everything else, including all the left-hand portions of the entries, is broken away and lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse; all cases broken at left) 1. [...] , [...] ... (illegible sign) 2. [...] , [...] NUNUZ (egg/roe?) — SANGA (temple administrator?) 3. [...] , [...] ... (illegible sign) 4. 3 (units) , [...] ... NI (oil/fat?) — small(?) 5. [...] , [...] (entirely lost) 6. [...] , [...] URU (settlement/city) (rest destroyed)
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 [...] , [...] 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-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.