Position in chronology
UET 2, 0081a
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative account from Early Dynastic Ur, roughly 2700–2600 BCE, excavated at Tell Muqayyar and now in Philadelphia. It tallies quantities of goods — wine (or a grape product) linked to a field, sheep, and other entries — against personnel or institutional labels, including one entry marked with the sign that later means 'king.' It is a scrap of the earliest bookkeeping tradition: numbers pressed into clay alongside pictographic labels, from a city administration still developing writing itself.
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 readable lines say something like: forty units credited to the ŠEŠ+IB group, connected with a field and wine; a mixed count (one ten, one larger unit, three ones) of sheep under the heading ME; twenty units for the ŠEŠ group, though the next sign is illegible. Then the tablet breaks. After the gap we can still make out: ten of something; an entry under ME involving the sign AN; seventy units connected with the 'lugal' (a ruler or high institutional office); and one final entry of ten-plus before the text is lost. The reverse is too worn to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 4(N14) — field(?): ŠEŠ+IB (group/designation), wine; 1(N14) 1(N22) 3(N01) — ME, sheep; 2(N14) — ŠEŠ ... (sign illegible); [...] — [...]; 1(N14) [...] — [...]; ... — ME, AN [...]; 7(N14) — ... (illegible sign), LUGAL [...]; 1(N14) ... [...] — [...]. (Remainder broken; the reverse is eroded and preserves no legible text.)
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
4(N14@f) , GAN2 |SZESZ~a+IB~a| GESZTIN~c 1(N14@f) 1(N22@f) 3(N01@f) , ME~a UDU~a 2(N14@f) , SZESZ~a# X [...] , [...] 1(N14@f) [...] , [...] , ME~a AN# [...] 7(N14@f) , X LUGAL# [...] 1(N14@f) X [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0081a. 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 (P005655) — 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.