Position in chronology
UET 2, 0040
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative tablet from the city of Ur, written around 2700–2600 BCE in one of the earliest phases of cuneiform. Only scattered words survive — a person, a lord, calves, a dagger, dairy fat, and a couple of round numbers like 30 and 10 — but they are enough to show this was a bookkeeping record: goods, animals, and perhaps officials being tallied by a temple or palace administrator. Fragments like this are the raw paperwork of the world's first cities, showing writing used for accounting long before it recorded literature.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger, but most of it is gone. What remains reads roughly: something 'in hand' or received; a person; something dated or counted by day; a dagger; thirty of something under a ŠITA-official or connected with an unidentified item; an entry for a lord; then several lines too broken to read; then two entries mentioning calves; and finally ten units of something, possibly cream or dairy fat. The quantities, the recipients' names, and the purpose of the transaction are lost in the breaks.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse; all lines fragmentary) [...] ... [...] hand (ŠU) [...] ... [...] ... [...] ... person (LU2) [...] ... [...] day (U4) [...] ... — dagger (GIR2) 30 (3 × N14) — ŠITA-official(?) ... (sign LAK350) [...] ... [...] lord (EN) [...] ... [...] [...] (line lost) [...] (line lost) [...] ... [...] calf (AMAR) [...] ... [...] calf (AMAR) 10 (1 × N14) [...] — [...] dairy fat / cream (GARA2)?
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
[...] , [...] SZU# [...] , [...] X , [...] X LU2 [...] , [...] U4# [...] X , GIR2~a 3(N14@f) , SZITA~c LAK350 [...] , [...] EN~a# [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] AMAR# [...] , [...] AMAR 1(N14@f)# [...] , [...] GARA2~a#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0040. 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 (P005613) — 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.