Position in chronology
MS 2782/14
About this tablet
This is a tiny, badly worn clay fragment from the proto-cuneiform Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), among the very earliest writing on earth. It appears to be an administrative account — tallying numbers of workmen, goods, or personnel against a storehouse and a high-ranking official (the 'EN' title) — but so little survives intact that its exact transaction cannot be reconstructed. Fragments like this one, likely from Umma in southern Iraq, are the raw bookkeeping residue 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 scattered pieces of this record survive. One line seems to tally '2' units connected to a storehouse and a group of workmen who were 'brought' or 'delivered' somewhere. Other lines mention a possible 'remainder' or leftover allocation, and further numbers ('1', then '4') appear alongside a reference to a lord or high official. Everything else — the goods being counted, the full context of the transaction — is lost to breaks and surface damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] 2 (units) , storehouse(?) — bring/deliver: workmen [...] , ... [...] [...] , [...] remainder(?) ... [...] [...] 1 (unit) , [...] [...] , [...] ... 4 (units) [...] , lord/high official — TE [...]
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
[...] , [...] 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-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-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.