Position in chronology
UET 2, 0033
About this tablet
A badly damaged accounting tablet from the Early Dynastic city of Ur, roughly 2800–2600 BCE — some of the earliest written records from that city. The surviving entries count livestock and goods in large round numbers: seventy and fifty young animals (calves), ninety units of some garden product or container, and possibly pigs, apparently tied to a storehouse. It is the fragmentary ledger of an institutional household keeping track of its animals and provisions, from the first centuries of writing at Ur.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a torn page from a warehouse ledger. What remains reads roughly: '...an entry involving a pig(?)... seventy calves belonging to the storehouse... ninety units of garden produce (or measuring baskets)... fifty calves, recorded by the jar...' — and then a final line too broken to make out. The beginnings of every line, which would have named the people or offices responsible, are lost. What survives is the count itself: round numbers of young animals and goods flowing through an institution at Ur nearly five thousand years ago.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse; all lines broken at the beginning) [...] ... [...] [...] ... pig(?) [...] 7(N14) [= 70]: calves, ... of the storehouse [...] 9(N14) [= 90]: SAR-vessels(?) (garden produce in MA-containers?) [...] 5(N14) [= 50]: calves, ... jar-with-HI(?) [...] ... [...] ... HI(?) (remainder broken)
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
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] SZAH2~a#? [...] 7(N14) , AMAR X E2~a [...] 9(N14) , SAR~a MA [...] 5(N14) , AMAR |DUG~axHI| [...] , [...] X HI#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0033. 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 (P005606) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.