Position in chronology
UET 2, 0068a
About this tablet
A badly damaged fragment of an Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, roughly 2700–2500 BCE — a piece of routine institutional bookkeeping from one of Mesopotamia's oldest cities. The only fully legible entry records three units of barley; the other lines preserve scraps mentioning a storehouse, a vessel, and possibly a female official. It survives as a witness to the earliest phase of writing at Ur, when script was still used almost exclusively for accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only fragments of this account survive. One line clearly records a delivery or allocation of three measures of barley. Around it, broken entries mention what seems to be a household or storehouse, a jar of some kind, and a person or office written with the 'mother' sign — perhaps a female overseer. A final damaged line ends with signs that may note an action carried out, but too much is lost to say what transaction was being recorded. The rest of the tablet is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary entries) [...] , [...] ... AMA (mother/female overseer?) ... A 3 (units, N01 notation) , barley [...] , [...] TI [of/at?] the house/storehouse (E2) [...] , [...] a šagan-vessel(?) [...] , [...] AK (made/performed?) ... AN ... MUŠ3 (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
[...] , [...] X AMA~b A 3(N01@f)# , SZE~a [...] , [...] TI# E2~a [...] , [...] SZAGAN#? [...] , [...] AK~a# AN# MUSZ3~a#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0068a. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005641) — 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.