Position in chronology
UET 2, 0039
About this tablet
A badly broken accounting tablet from the very early city of Ur, written around 2800 BCE in an archaic stage of cuneiform. What survives is a list of quantities — tens and units marked with round numeral impressions — set against category labels: a dairy allocation under a chief overseer, and goods connected with the household of the moon-god Nanna, Ur's chief deity. It is a scrap of the everyday bookkeeping of one of the world's first urban temple economies; most of the entries' recipients are lost to damage.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger fragment. The first surviving line is a heading: a dairy (cream) allocation under the chief overseer. Then the entries: forty units credited to UR (perhaps a man named Ur-sag), first quality; at least ten units for the Nanna temple, also first quality; then ten more, thirty more, two of a larger unit, and two single units — but the names of whoever received those last four amounts are broken away. The rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] — GARA2 (dairy/cream), chief overseer (PA GAL). 4(N14) (= 40) — UR, first grade (or: the person Ur-sag). [...] 1(N14) (= [x+]10) — Nanna (the temple institution of Nanna), first grade. 1(N14) (= 10) — [...] 3(N14) (= 30) — [...] 2(N22)? — [...] 2(N01) (= 2) — [...] (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
[...] , GARA2~a PA~a GAL~a 4(N14) , UR~a SAG [...] 1(N14)# , NANNA~a SAG 1(N14) , [...] 3(N14) , [...] 2(N22)? , [...] 2(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0039. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005612) — 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.