Position in chronology
UET 2, 0134
About this tablet
A badly worn administrative fragment from Early Dynastic Ur, roughly 2700–2500 BCE, excavated at the site by Leonard Woolley (field number U.11877) and now in the British Museum. It is a piece of economic bookkeeping: numbered entries recording commodities — a sheep, measured goods, possibly garlic or onions — organized around a recurring sign (TUN3) whose exact meaning is still unresolved, perhaps a container or implement. Even in this damaged state it shows the city's scribes tracking goods with numerals and pictographic signs centuries before connected writing was common.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a page from an ancient inventory, most of it now crumbled away. What survives reads roughly: an entry pairing the TUN3 item with a sheep; one TUN3 item with a standard measuring vessel; then several lines too broken to read; an entry marking a first-quality TUN3 item; another noting a TUN3 item 'placed' or deposited alongside something; and one unit of what may be garlic or onions. The remaining lines on both sides are lost. In short, a clerk at Ur was counting off goods — livestock, measured produce, and implements — line by line, and only scraps of the ledger remain.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] : [...] TUN3-implement(?), sheep 1 : TUN3-implement(?), sila-measure/vessel [...] : [...] [...] : [...] ... : first-quality(?) TUN3-implement(?) [...] [...] : [...] DA(?), TUN3-implement(?), placed(?) 1 : garlic/onions(?) (SZUM) [...] : [...] [...] : [...]
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
[...] , [...] TUN3~a UDU~a# 1(N01@f)# , TUN3~a SILA3~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...] , SAG TUN3~a#? [...] [...] , [...] DA~a# TUN3~a GAR 1(N08@f) , SZUM? [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0134. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005714) — 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.