Position in chronology
UET 2, 0094
About this tablet
A badly worn administrative tablet from Ur in southern Iraq, written in the Early Dynastic period (early third millennium BCE) and excavated at the site by Leonard Woolley (excavation number U.12823, now in the British Museum). It is a bookkeeping record: a series of counted entries — small quantities set against goods, animals, or personnel, with references to a 'field', a 'young animal', and the Abzu (a temple or cultic institution). Too damaged to reconstruct the full transaction, it nevertheless shows the machinery of temple-estate accounting already at work in one of the world's oldest cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an account ledger. What survives are scraps of individual entries: something to do with a field and a young animal; an entry mentioning a senior woman (or 'mother' category); one item of an unclear kind with a container; three units of a first-grade commodity; three horns (or similar items) connected with the Abzu shrine; then, after a badly broken stretch, larger tallies — twenty-odd of one thing, four of another, a few more units — and what looks like a closing summary line marked with a date. Most of the commodity names and any personal names are lost to surface damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary; entries in cases with numerals) [...] — field(?), AN, young animal [...] — dais(?), AMA (senior female / mother-sign) [...] — [...] ... (illegible sign) 1 (N22-unit) — ..., GA2-container(?), ..., DA (unresolved marker) 3 (units) — first-quality(?) ..., UR 3 (units) — SI (horn/implement?), AMA, (of the) Abzu [...] — [...] ... (illegible) [...] — [...] (line lost) 2 (tens) 1 (N22-unit) 2 (units) [...] — GISZ3(?) [...] 4 (units) — ... [...] 1 (N22-unit) 3 (units) — ... [...] (summary?) [...] 1 (ten) — day(?), first(?) [...]
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
[...] , GAN2 AN# AMAR [...] , BARA2~a# AMA~b [...] , [...] X 1(N22) , X GA2~a1# X DA~a# 3(N01) , SAG# X UR~a 3(N01)# , SI AMA~b ABZU [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] 2(N14) 1(N22) 2(N01) [...] , GISZ3~a#? [...] 4(N01) , X [...] 1(N22) 3(N01) , X [...] [...] 1(N14) , U4 SAG [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0094. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005669) — 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.