Position in chronology
MS 2782/09
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the late Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably originating from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records quantities — mostly ones and twos in the archaic round-impression numeral system — against commodity or personnel signs that are too damaged or ambiguous to read with confidence. The surviving entries seem to involve deliveries or allocations of goods (possibly grain, plant products, garments, or fuel), with notations that may track movement or responsible personnel. It is one of humanity's earliest attempts at written record-keeping: a bureaucratic scratch-pad from the very dawn of literacy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a broken list of small quantities — mostly one or two units each — set against signs for various commodities or categories, some of which relate to grain, foot-messengers or deliveries, possibly a garment or weighing notation, and something like fuel or fire. A final legible entry records a quantity of grain described as first-quality (or under a chief official). Most of the entries are too damaged to read fully; the beginning and end of the tablet are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] NI~a [...] [...] 2 , [type/commodity: ISZ~b?] 2 , X [...] [...] , [...] 1 , GIR3~c [foot-delivery / movement notation] 1 , U2~b GIR3@g~b [plant/pasture + foot notation] 2 [...] , [...] NI~a[?] 1 , LA2 TUG2~a? [hanging/weighing + garment?] 1 , NE~a [...] [fire/fuel commodity?] 6 , X [...] 2 , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] |SZE~a.NAM2| SAG [barley/grain (NAM2) — chief/first-quality or head-count] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] NI~a# [...] , [...] 2(N01) , ISZ~b? 2(N01)# , X [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01)# , GIR3~c 1(N01) , U2~b GIR3@g~b 2(N01)# [...] , [...] NI~a#? 1(N01) , LA2 TUG2~a? 1(N01) , NE~a# [...] 6(N01)# , X [...] 2(N01)# , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] |SZE~a.NAM2|# SAG# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/09. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006129) — 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.