Position in chronology
MS 2782/04
About this tablet
This is one of the earliest administrative records in human history, dating to the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE) — before writing had fully developed into a phonetic system. A temple or palace accountant in southern Mesopotamia (possibly the ancient city of Umma) used proto-cuneiform signs impressed and incised into a clay tablet to record quantities of female livestock — she-goats and ewes — and apparently some category of grain. The tablet is badly damaged, but what survives is a livestock-and-commodity tally of the kind that drove the invention of writing itself: the need to keep track of institutional assets. It is now held in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What remains of this tablet records livestock counts: 17 she-goats, 8 ewes, and at least one further entry that is now broken away. There is also a damaged line referencing a category of grain (possibly a specific institutional allocation of barley or emmer). Several lines at the beginning and end are too damaged to read. The right-hand column appears to have been left blank or is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] [...] , [broken] |GRAIN.NAM2|# [...] , [...] 1(N14) 7(N01) , she-goats 8(N01) , ewe[s]#? 1(N14)# [...] 3(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] , [...] |SZE~a.NAM2|# [...] , [...] 1(N14) 7(N01) , UD5~a 8(N01) , U8#? 1(N14)# [...] 3(N01)# , [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/04. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006124) — 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.