Position in chronology
UET 2, 0133
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative tablet from the city of Ur, written in the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2800–2600 BCE — among the earliest written records from that famous site. The surviving entries record quantities of goods in archaic number notation, including jars and items connected with the Abzu, the sacred freshwater domain of the god Enki, suggesting the accounting of a temple household. Too little survives to say exactly what transaction it documented, but it is a snapshot of the bookkeeping that ran an early Sumerian institution.
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 inventory or delivery record. The top of the account is lost. What remains reads roughly: ten of something; a quantity of one large measure and two small measures of an unnamed good; horns (or vessels) belonging to the Abzu shrine; two measures of a 'KAL'-grade commodity; another one-and-two measure entry of jars; an unnumbered line that seems to be a label mentioning something divine and a young animal; and finally twenty units of the KAL commodity, marked 'GAR' — perhaps 'deposited' or 'bread'. Everything before, after, and around these entries is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse; upper lines broken) [...] , [...] [...] , [...] ... [...] , [...] ... [...] 1(N14) [= 10] , [...] 1(N19) 2(N04) , ... [...] , horn(s?) of the Abzu [...] 2(N19) , KAL(-grade?) [...] 1(N19) 2(N04) , jar(s) [...] , AN AN AMAR (divine ... young animal / label) 2(N14) [= 20] , KAL(-grade?) — GAR (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 [...] 1(N14) , [...] 1(N19) 2(N04) , X [...] , SI ABZU# [...] 2(N19) , KAL~b2 [...] 1(N19) 2(N04) , DUG~a# [...] , AN AN AMAR 2(N14)# , KAL~b2 GAR
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0133. 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 (P005713) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.