Position in chronology
UET 2, 0046
About this tablet
A small administrative account from Early Dynastic Ur, roughly 2800–2600 BCE — among the earliest written documents from that city, excavated at Tell Muqayyar and now in the Penn Museum. A scribe tallied large quantities (entries of 600, 60, 30, and 10 in the archaic numeral system) of goods or animals, mentioning calves, a courtyard or storage compound, and a cattle-stall. Too worn to reconstruct the transaction fully, it nonetheless shows bookkeeping at Ur centuries before connected Sumerian prose existed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger, most of it rubbed away. What survives are the numbers and a few labels: an entry of 600 of something now lost; then 30 of another item; a line mentioning the courtyard, or storage area, and calves; another 600 booked against the NUN institution or storehouse; 10 units of an item written with the GI4 sign; something connected with the cattle-stall; and finally 60 units of a commodity written with a special compound sign, perhaps a grain or bread product. Several lines are broken or too damaged to read at all.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 1(N45) [= 600?] [...] — [...] [...] (line broken) 3(N14) [= 30] [...] — [...] [...] (line broken) ... courtyard(?) — calf(s) 1(N45) [= 600?] — NUN(-official/storehouse), door(?) ..., (sign lost) 1(N14) [= 10] — GI4 ..., (sign lost) ..., cattle-stall(?) ..., (sign lost) 1(N34) [= 60] — (commodity written with the compound sign NINDA₂×(GIŠ.DAR))
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
1(N45)# [...] , [...] , [...] 3(N14)# [...] , [...] , KISAL~b1#? AMAR 1(N45) , NUN~a IG~a X 1(N14) , GI4~b X , X AB~a X 1(N34) , |NINDA2x(GISZ.DAR~a)|
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0046. 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 (P005619) — 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.