Position in chronology
UET 2, 0099
About this tablet
One of the earliest written documents from the city of Ur, dating to the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2700–2600 BCE — centuries before the famous royal tombs. It is an administrative account: a scribe recorded quantities of goods, most likely barley, listed against officials and institutional categories, including a sanga (temple administrator). The tablet is broken at its lower right, so the end of the account and any total are lost. Texts like this show writing at Ur still in its archaic stage, used almost entirely for bookkeeping rather than literature.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger. It lists amounts against names and offices: 45 units under a damaged heading involving 'great' and a placement or bread term; an entry of flour(?) with no surviving number; 58 units marked 'done' or 'processed'; 30 units of barley connected with Ur and an overseer; 30 units under a senior woman (or 'mother') and something called a 'figure'; 30 more under another overseer whose title is partly broken; and 40 units under the temple administrator, noted with 'calf' — perhaps young animals in his charge, or marking him as a junior official. The final entries are broken away, and the back of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 45 — ... (broken sign), GAL ("great"?), GAR (no number preserved) — NI, ZI (flour?) 58 — AK 30 — barley, Ur(?), PA-official, A[...] 30 — AMA (senior female official / "mother"?), ALAN (figure/statue?) 30 — [...] HI(?), PA-official 40 — sanga-official, AMAR (calf / junior) (Break) [...] ... [...] (reverse: uninscribed apart from scratches; edges uninscribed)
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)# 5(N01@f) , X GAL~a GAR , NI~b ZI~a 5(N14@f) 8(N01@f) , AK~a 3(N14@f) , SZE~a URI5 PA~a A# 3(N14@f) , AMA~b# ALAN~a# 3(N14@f) , [...] HI#? PA~a 4(N14@f) , SANGA~a AMAR , [...] , X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0099. 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 (P005674) — 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.