MS 2782/14

~3100 BCE·Uruk Period·P006134

About this tablet

A small, badly worn accounting tablet from the very dawn of writing, the Uruk period (late fourth millennium BCE), perhaps from Umma in southern Iraq. It is not a sentence but a ledger: numbered entries recording small quantities — of goods or laborers — connected with a storehouse, a delivery, a gang of workers, and a high official titled EN. Tablets like this show that writing was invented not for literature but for bookkeeping, and even in its damaged state this fragment preserves the skeleton of one of humanity's first administrative records.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

This is a fragment of an account book. The first entry is lost. The second reads: 2 units — for the storehouse, a delivery, workmen. The next two entries are too damaged to make out beyond a sign or two. Then: 1 unit of something now lost; another broken entry; and finally 4 units of something connected with the lord (the EN, the chief official) and a party or category written TE. The rest of the tablet, including the back, carries no readable text.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

Obverse 1. [...] , [...] 2. 2 (units): the storehouse (E2) — delivery (DU) — male workers (ERIM); 3. [...] : ... [...] 4. [...] : [...] TAK4 ... ...; 5. 1 (unit): [...]; 6. [...] : [...] ...; 7. 4 (units) [...] : the EN (lord/priest-ruler), TE [...]. (The reverse is uninscribed apart from faint traces; the rest of the obverse entries are broken away.)

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

[...] , [...]
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. 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 (P006134) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).

Related tablets

Related sources

~3200 BCE

Proto-Cuneiform Account Tablet (VAT 15211)

An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.

~2050 BCE

Umma Livestock and Personnel Account (AnOr 1, 243)

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.

~3300 BCE

AoF 30, 238,1