Position in chronology
MS 2782/12
About this tablet
A small fragment of one of the world's earliest written documents, from the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), possibly from Umma in southern Iraq. It is a piece of an administrative account: numbered entries tallying goods or deliveries, each line pairing a quantity with a commodity or an institution such as a storehouse. Too little survives to say what was being counted, but the fragment shows bookkeeping — not literature — at the very birth of writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a scrap of an ancient ledger. What remains are the stubs of at least six entries: one of something now lost; one of a commodity written with the sign NIM; two of something qualified as 'black'; an entry mentioning the sign AN, whose role here is unclear; and one item connected with a house or storehouse. The last line and everything around the edges of the fragment are broken away, so the totals, the goods, and the people involved are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] 1 (unit) ... [...] 2. 1 (unit), NIM ... [...] 3. [...] 2 (units), black ... [...] 4. [...] ... AN ... [...] 5. 1 (unit), the house/storehouse(?) ... [...] 6. [...] ... [...] (rest of the fragment broken; the reverse is uninscribed as photographed)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
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. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; 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-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.