Position in chronology
UET 2, supp 07
About this tablet
A small clay fragment from Ur in southern Iraq, written some 4,500 years ago in the Early Dynastic period. It is a plain administrative roster: a column of personal names, each preceded by the archaic numeral 'one', of the kind kept when an institution counted out workers or issued one ration, one allotment, or one animal per named man. The lower half of the tablet has broken away and one entry is worn beyond reading, so we cannot tell what was being counted — but the names themselves survive: Lugal-šu, Ša-nugal, A-nuzu, Dada, Ur-Šubur. The back was left blank, and now carries only the excavation number U 13806 and the British Museum number 128970 in ink.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
One each, by name: [name broken], Lugal-šu, Ša-nugal, A-nuzu, and one more man whose name is now illegible. Several lines are lost in the break. The list picks up again with one each for Dada, A-utu-ta, and Ur-Šubur. The back of the tablet was never written on.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (unit/person): AN [...] DU 1 (unit/person): Lugal-šu 1 (unit/person): Ša-nugal 1 (unit/person): A-nuzu 1 (unit/person): [two signs, illegible] [... break ...] 1 (unit/person): Dada 1 (unit/person): A-utu-ta (?) 1 (unit/person): Ur-Šubur (Reverse: uninscribed; the surface bears only modern museum markings.)
Our translation engine — Opus 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(asz@c) AN [...] DU 1(asz@c) lugal-szu 1(asz@c) sza3-nu-gal2 1(asz@c) a-nu-zu 1(asz@c)# x x [x] [...] 1(asz@c) da-da 1(asz@c) a2-utu#?-ta 1(asz@c) ur-szubur
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — UET 2, supp 07. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P250334) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.