Position in chronology
MS 2782/10
About this tablet
This is one of the earliest written documents in human history — a small clay tablet fragment from the Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), almost certainly from a southern Mesopotamian administrative center, possibly Umma. It records quantities of commodities — fish, and possibly other goods connected to the Tigris River — in the proto-cuneiform script that preceded fully readable Sumerian writing. The numbers are impressed with a stylus using a complex metrological system whose exact values still partly elude scholars. Tablets like this represent the very birth of writing: not poetry or prayer, but accountancy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is badly broken and only fragments of the accounting entries survive. One line mentions the Tigris River alongside fish and what may be a size or quality designation ('large'). Another line records numerical totals — three large units, then one large unit distributed or allotted — along with signs that may indicate a category of personnel or a type of transaction. The bottom portion preserves a series of counts: one large unit, one large unit plus two smaller units, and six smaller units, though each entry's commodity or recipient is lost. The rest of the text is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] X [...] IDIGNA (Tigris) ME~a X fish [AD~a] large [...] [...] X [...] [...] [...] AN UR5~a A 3(N57) NAM2 DI 1(N57) BA [...] [...] [...] [...] 1(N14)# [...] 1(N14)# 2(N01)? [...] 6(N01)# [...] [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X , IDIGNA ME~a X KU6~a RAD~a GAL~a [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] , AN UR5~a A 3(N57) NAM2 DI 1(N57) BA [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14)# , [...] 1(N14)# 2(N01)#? , [...] 6(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/10. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006130) — 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.