Position in chronology
UET 2, 0124
About this tablet
A badly damaged administrative tablet from Ur in southern Iraq, written in the Early Dynastic period (early third millennium BCE) — among the oldest layers of accounting from that city. What survives are a few round-numbered entries — 10, 40, 20, 20 of something — with one line apparently mentioning female personnel connected to a household or storehouse, perhaps a ration list. Too little remains to say what was being counted or for whom, but it is a genuine scrap of the everyday bookkeeping that ran an early Sumerian city.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only fragments of this account can still be read. The top lines are gone or reduced to unreadable traces. Then come the numbers: an entry of 10 of something now lost; an entry of 40, apparently connected with women of a household or storehouse and some kind of allocation; then two entries of 20 each, their objects broken away. The final line and the rest of the tablet are lost. In modern terms it is a page from a ledger with only the quantity column and half a description surviving: 10, 40 (for the women of the house), 20, 20 — of what, we can no longer tell.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, column entries; the tablet is broken on all sides) [...] ... [...] (illegible sign) [...] ... [...] (illegible sign) [...] ... [...] (two illegible signs) [...] ... [...] ... [...] [...] ... [...] 10 (1 × N14): ... [...] 40 (4 × N14) [...]: [...] female (workers?) of the household ... TI(-ration?) [...] 20 (2 × N14) [...]: [...] 20 (2 × N14) [...]: [...] [...] ... [...] (remainder broken)
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
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X X [...] , [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14@f) , X [...] 4(N14@f) [...] , [...] SAL E2~a TI [...] 2(N14@f) [...] , [...] 2(N14@f) [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0124. 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 (P005704) — 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.