Position in chronology
MS 2782/02
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), likely originating from the Umma region of southern Iraq. It records quantities of commodities — possibly including containers, eggs or seed stock, and a vessel or boat type — in the characteristic two-column format of the earliest Mesopotamian bookkeeping. The numbers (2, 3, 4) are impressed using the standard Uruk numerical system of round and wedge impressions. This is among the very oldest writing in human history: not literature or law, but the mundane arithmetic of an ancient storeroom.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads something like: '2 [of commodity X, with notation] RU; [entries for] MA, KI, NUNUZ; [entries for] SUKUD, NI; then further quantities: 2 of [unknown item]; 4 of BAN-measure [unknown item]; 3 of [unknown item].' Most of the commodity labels are too damaged or too archaic to read with confidence. The tablet is essentially a tally — a storekeeper's record of small quantities of several different goods, with the names of those goods mostly lost to time.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] 2 , [...] X RU [...] , [...] MA KI NUNUZ~a1 [...] , [...] SUKUD@g NI~a [...] , [...] 2 , X [...] 4 , BAN~b? X [...] 3 , [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] 2(N01)# , [...] X RU [...] , [...] MA KI NUNUZ~a1 [...] , [...] SUKUD@g~d#? NI~a [...] , [...] 2(N01) , X [...] 4(N01) , BAN~b#? X [...] 3(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/02. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006122) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.