Position in chronology
UET 2, 0123
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Early Dynastic Ur, about 2600 BCE, excavated at Tell Muqayyar and now in the Penn Museum. It is an account: rows of numeral impressions (14, 15, 13 of something) paired with commodity signs — a flour or ration category, and apparently wool and linen. Tablets like this are the everyday bookkeeping of one of the world's first cities, showing officials counting out textiles and foodstuffs centuries before connected prose writing existed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short tally sheet. Someone counted out fourteen units of one item (the entry is damaged, marked as 'done' or 'made'), fifteen units of a flour or ration category, and thirteen units of something now broken away. A further line seems to record wool and linen that were handed over or deposited. The last entry, and whatever quantities went with it, are lost to damage, 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) 14 [+ x ...] ..., AK ("made/performed") 15 ..., NI-ZI (flour/ration category) 13 [+ x? ...] ..., ... [...] ..., wool(?), deposited(?), linen [...] ... [...] (remainder broken; reverse 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.
Engine notes
read from photo6 uncertain terms ↓
- N14@f / N01@f — The @f modifier indicates a 'flat' variant of the impressed numeral; the commodity system governing these counts is uncertain — in some proto-cuneiform systems N14 = 10× N01, but this varies by context.
- AK~a — Proto-cuneiform sign; later AK means 'to do/make' but its precise administrative function here — processed product, action term, or category label — is unresolved.
- NI~b ZI~a — Both signs are attested in proto-cuneiform but their combination and semantic value in this context are unclear; NI can relate to oil or fat, ZI to flour or life-force, but neither reading is secure this early.
- SIG2~a1 — Marked with ? in the transliteration; may indicate 'fine quality' wool or textile grade, but the sign identification is uncertain given surface damage.
- RU — Reading of proto-cuneiform RU is debated: possible meanings include 'gift,' 'delivery,' or an institutional action; its value here is unresolved.
- GADA~a — Broadly accepted as the proto-cuneiform sign for linen cloth, but the precise textile category it denotes in the early dynastic Ur context may differ from the later Sumerian term gada.
Reasoning ↓
The photo shows a small, roughly rounded clay tablet photographed from multiple angles (obverse, reverse, edges, and top). The museum number U12851 / 37-7-28 is legible on the label in the bottom image, consistent with the catalog entry UM 37-07-028. The obverse (center-top image) preserves several columns of impressed and incised signs: on the left side I can make out vertical groupings of wedge/circle impressions consistent with proto-cuneiform numerals (N14 and N01 types — large circular and smaller round impressions), and to the right there are more complex incised signs, though the surface is heavily damaged with a large lacuna/hole through the center of the tablet that destroys a significant portion of the text. The left edge view shows what appears to be additional horizontal impressed signs. The reverse (bottom large image) is nearly blank or heavily eroded with no legible text visible. The top view shows faint signs but at this resolution they cannot be reliably identified. The transliteration's numerical structure (1 N14 + 4 N01, 1 N14 + 5 N01, 1 N14 + 3 N01) is broadly consistent with the grouped impressions visible on the obverse left, though the large central break means that most of the sign columns on the right side — including AK~a, NI~b ZI~a, SIG2, RU, GADA — cannot be verified from the photo. The damage described in the transliteration (brackets, lacunae) matches the visible physical destruction of the tablet surface. Transliteration-photo agreement is partial; much cannot be confirmed due to surface loss.
Generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 · prompt 2026-05-12/v4-interpretation · May 16, 2026 · 2169 in / 1028 out tokens
Transliteration
1(N14@f) 4(N01@f) [...] , AK~a 1(N14@f) 5(N01@f) , NI~b ZI~a 1(N14@f)# 3(N01@f)# [...] , X [...] , SIG2~a1? RU GADA~a# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0123. 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 (P005703) — 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.