Position in chronology
MS 2782/12
About this tablet
A tiny, badly broken clay tablet fragment from the Uruk period — among the earliest phases of human writing, roughly 3300–3000 BCE. It is an administrative accounting record, logging small numerical entries (units of 1 or 2) alongside commodity or category signs that are now too damaged to read with confidence. Tablets like this one are the oldest bureaucratic paperwork in the world: temple or palace officials in southern Mesopotamia used proto-cuneiform impressed notation to track goods, animals, or rations. Because so little survives here, we cannot identify the specific transaction, but the format is unmistakably that of an early Uruk-period ledger.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a short list of quantities and goods: one unit of something (sign damaged), one unit of 'NIM~b2' (a category we cannot securely identify), two units connected with 'GI6' and water or a liquid marker, something under the sign for sky/heaven or the god An, and one unit associated with what may be an enclosure or house sign. The rest of every line is broken away. In short: a partial inventory of at least five line-entries, each recording one or two units of commodities whose names are now lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1, X [...] 1, NIM~b2 [...] [...] 2, GI6 A [...] [...], AN [...] 1, [E2~b] X [...] [...], [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] 1(N01)# , X [...] 1(N01) , NIM~b2# [...] [...] 2(N01)# , GI6# A [...] [...] , AN [...] 1(N01) , E2~b#? X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/12. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006132) — 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.