Position in chronology
UET 2, 0011
About this tablet
A badly worn administrative tablet from the earliest levels of Ur, written around 2800–2600 BCE in the archaic script that preceded fully developed cuneiform. The surviving entries are bookkeeping notations — quantities of goods such as a bird, salt, barley, and a donkey, possibly connected to an assembly or institution. Tablets like this one are among the oldest economic records from Ur, showing that centuries before its famous royal tombs the city already ran a written accounting system, even if much of this text is now eroded beyond recovery.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary ledger. What remains readable are scattered entries: something involving an aromatic or combustible substance, one unit of an item described with the bird sign, an entry mentioning a hoe, water, and possibly the assembly, then — after damaged lines — salt paired with a donkey, a delivery or transaction marked as 'done' involving an unidentified commodity, and finally barley and salt. The quantities and names that once accompanied most of these goods are lost to surface wear; only the skeleton of the account survives.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] , [...] ... (illegible sign) [...] , aromatic substance(?) ... fuel(?) [...] 1 , [...] ... bird [...] , [...] hoe(?), water(?), assembly(?) (Break) ... , salt(?) — donkey ... , "made/delivered"(?) — (unidentified commodity sign ZATU687) [...] , barley(?) — salt(?)
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
[...] , [...] X [...] , SZIM~a NE~a# [...] 1(N01) , [...] X MUSZEN [...] , [...] AL A UKKIN~a# , MUN~b#? ANSZE~b , AK~a ZATU687 [...] , SZE~a#? MUN~b#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0011. 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 (P005585) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.
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.