Position in chronology
UET 2, 0073
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from the city of Ur, written in the Early Dynastic period nearly 5,000 years ago, when writing was still close to its pictographic beginnings. It records quantities of barley, flour, and other grain products in the archaic numeral system — deep circular impressions pressed into the clay — and connects them to a 'Lady' (a goddess or high-ranking woman) and to a field belonging to Nanna, the moon god who was Ur's chief deity. It is a glimpse of temple estate bookkeeping at the dawn of literate administration.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The top of the record is broken away. What survives is a ledger entry: amounts of barley and flour, and something oily or fatty alongside more flour. Then the totals — one large unit and six tens of barley, marked as delivered, plus two measures of another grain product. The final lines tie the whole account to 'the Lady' and to the field of Nanna, the moon god — in other words, grain accounted for against a temple estate's farmland at Ur. The back of the tablet is blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] ... [...] ... barley(?), flour(?) ... oil(?), flour 1(N34) 6(N14) — barley ... delivered (lit. "made") 1(N36) 1(N19) — ASZ2-grain ... the Lady (NIN) ... field of Nanna (reverse uninscribed)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] , [...] , SZE~a#? ZI~a#? , NI~b ZI~a 1(N34@f) 6(N14@f) , SZE~a , AK~a 1(N36@f) 1(N19@f) , ASZ2 , NIN , GAN2 NANNA~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0073. 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 (P005647) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.