Position in chronology
MS 2782/13
About this tablet
A group of small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform clay tablet fragments from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), possibly originating from the site of Umma in southern Iraq. What survives suggests an administrative or accounting record — the kind of tally a temple bureaucrat would keep to track commodities, personnel categories, or institutional allocations. The sign SANGA (temple administrator) and numeric notation point to institutional record-keeping at its very earliest stage, before true writing had fully developed. These fragments are among the oldest bureaucratic documents in human history, and even in their broken state they offer a window into the organizational complexity of the world's first cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The fragments are too broken to reconstruct a coherent record. What survives includes a reference to a temple administrator, a small numeral (possibly '3'), a quantity or category marker that may relate to oil or fat, a designation for something 'junior' or 'small,' and a reference to a city or settlement. The rest of the entries are lost or illegible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] (unclear sign) [...] , [...] eggs/spawn(?) — temple administrator(?) [...] , [...] (unclear sign) 3(N01)[?] , [...] (unclear sign) — NI~a — junior/small [...] , [...] [...] , [...] city/settlement
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] NUNUZ~a0 SANGA~a#? [...] , [...] X 3(N01)# , [...] X NI~a TUR# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] URU~a1
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/13. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006133) — 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.