Position in chronology
UET 2, 0135bis
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative tablet from the ancient city of Ur, written in the Early Dynastic period — among the earliest phases of writing in Mesopotamia. The surviving sign clusters point to an economic record involving a temple administrator, wine, date palms, a plow, and a field: the kind of ledger a household or temple estate kept of its agricultural goods and personnel. Too little survives to reconstruct the transaction, but the entries show the standard bookkeeping vocabulary of Ur's earliest institutional economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only fragments of this account survive. One entry mentions a house or household; another names a temple administrator in connection with wine. A third records a quantity of twenty of something, bundled and accounted for as done. Another line lists estate items together — a date palm, a senior woman (or the AMA-official), a stone vessel, a horn, and a plow — and the last legible line pairs a field with wine and water, perhaps orchard land under irrigation. The left half of every line is broken away, and the reverse is too worn to read, so the names and totals that once anchored this record are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: [...] ... [...] ..., house(?) [...] ... [...] temple administrator (SANGA), wine [...] 2(N14) (= 20 units): bundled(?), ... — made/performed (AK) [...] date palm, AMA (senior female official?), BUR-vessel, horn (SI), plow (APIN) [...] ..., field (GAN2), wine, water (The tablet is broken; the beginnings of all lines are lost. The reverse and edges preserve no legible text.)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] , [...] X E2~a#? [...] , [...] SANGA~a# GESZTIN~c [...] 2(N14) , KESZ2 RA AK~a [...] , GISZIMMAR~b1# AMA~b BUR~a# SI APIN~a [...] , X GAN2 GESZTIN~c A
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0135bis. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005716) — 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.