Position in chronology
UET 2, supp 12
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Ur in southern Iraq, written in the Early Dynastic period (roughly the mid-third millennium BCE). It is a personnel roster: a scribe simply tallied people one by one, writing the numeral "1" before each man's name. Several of the names begin with lugal- ("king"), a common pious naming pattern of the era, and others invoke local deities such as Nintu and Nanna, the moon-god of Ur. Lists like this one are the raw bookkeeping of a temple or estate household — the record of who was owed rations, or who was assigned to a work gang.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The top of the tablet is lost. What survives is a headcount, one name per line: Dada, Sag-ti, Ur-Nintu, Lugal-ur-[…], Amar-Ninkilim, Lugal-Nanna-ratum, Lugal-lu-titi, Lugal-enishe, Lugal-ki, and Nigar-mud — each counted as a single man. Whatever total or summary the scribe added at the end has broken away, so we cannot tell what the men were being listed for.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(beginning broken) 1 (person): Da-[da] 1 (person): Sag-ti 1 (person): Ur-Nintu [1 (person)]: Lugal-ur-x [1 (person)]: Amar-Ninkilim [1 (person)?]: Lugal-Nanna-ra-tum 1 (person): Lugal-lu-titi 1 (person): Lugal-enishe 1 (person): Lugal-ki 1 (person): Nigar-[mud] (remainder lost)
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) da-[da] 1(asz@c) sag-ti# 1(asz@c) ur-nin-tu [1(asz@c)] lugal-ur-x [1(asz@c)] amar#-nin-kilim [1(asz@c)?] lugal-nanna#-ra-tum2 1(asz@c) lugal-lu2-ti-ti 1(asz@c) lugal-e2-ni-sze3 1(asz@c) lugal-ki 1(asz@c) nigar-[mud]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — UET 2, supp 12. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P250337) — 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.