Position in chronology
MS 2782/14
About this tablet
A tiny, heavily worn proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably from Umma in southern Iraq. It records small quantities — 1, 2, and 4 units — of labour or goods associated with an institutional building and a high-status official (the EN). Tablets like this are among the very earliest written documents in human history, used by temple or palace administrators to track workers, rations, or deliveries before a true writing system had fully developed. The surface is so eroded that most of the commodity and action signs can no longer be securely read.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries record a delivery or assignment of male workers to a storehouse or institutional building — 2 units — alongside a note of a remainder or release of some goods, and a separate entry of 1 unit of something unreadable. A final line records 4 units connected with a senior official (the EN). The rest of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] 2(N01) , [house/storehouse]? brought/delivered — male workers [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] remainder/left-behind? X X 1(N01) , [...] [...] , [...] X 4(N01) [...] , [lord/EN-official] approached/TE [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] 2(N01)# , E2~a#? DU ERIM~a [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] TAK4~a# X X 1(N01)# , [...] [...] , [...] X 4(N01)# [...] , EN~a# TE# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 2782/14. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006134) — 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.