Position in chronology
MS 2782/14
About this tablet
A small, badly worn accounting tablet from the very dawn of writing, the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), perhaps from Umma in southern Iraq. It is not a sentence but a ledger: numbered entries recording small quantities — of goods or laborers — connected with a storehouse, a delivery, a gang of workers, and a high official titled EN. Tablets like this show that writing was invented not for literature but for bookkeeping, and even in its damaged state this fragment preserves the skeleton of one of humanity's first administrative records.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an account book. The first entry is lost. The second reads: 2 units — for the storehouse, a delivery, workmen. The next two entries are too damaged to make out beyond a sign or two. Then: 1 unit of something now lost; another broken entry; and finally 4 units of something connected with the lord (the EN, the chief official) and a party or category written TE. The rest of the tablet, including the back, carries no readable text.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] , [...] 2. 2 (units): the storehouse (E2) — delivery (DU) — male workers (ERIM); 3. [...] : ... [...] 4. [...] : [...] TAK4 ... ...; 5. 1 (unit): [...]; 6. [...] : [...] ...; 7. 4 (units) [...] : the EN (lord/priest-ruler), TE [...]. (The reverse is uninscribed apart from faint traces; the rest of the obverse entries are broken away.)
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
[...] , [...] 2(N01)# , E2~a#? DU ERIM~a [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] TAK4~a# X X 1(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...] X 4(N01)# [...] , EN~a# TE# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/14. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006134) — 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.