Position in chronology
UET 2, 0136
About this tablet
A badly damaged administrative fragment from the ancient city of Ur, written in the Early Dynastic period — among the oldest phases of writing, when script was still largely a bookkeeping tool. What survives are a few numerical entries (round impressions standing for tens and units) each paired with terse category signs: a 'record' or tablet notation, possibly a storehouse, and a term that may name an official, a vessel type, or a commodity. It is a scrap of the everyday accounting that ran a Sumerian city five thousand years ago, too broken to tell us what exactly was being counted.
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 account ledger. The first lines are too damaged to read. Then come the surviving entries: a quantity of about twenty-one units logged under a record-keeping category alongside the signs PA3 and DA; about thirty-one units connected with a storehouse and something called IGI-BUR — perhaps an official or a type of vessel; then another entry of roughly twenty-one units whose subject is lost; and finally an entry of at least ten units, also broken away. The rest of the tablet is destroyed, so we cannot say what commodity was being tallied or for whom.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] : [...] (two unidentified signs) : [...] 2(N14) 1(N22) : record (DUB) — PA3 — DA 3(N14) 1(N22) : storehouse(?) (E2) — IGI-BUR [...] [...] 2(N14) 1(N22)(?) : [...] [...] 1(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 , [...] 2(N14) 1(N22) , DUB~a# PA3 DA~a# 3(N14) 1(N22) , E2~a? IGI BUR~a [...] [...] 2(N14)# 1(N22)#? , [...] [...] 1(N14)# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0136. 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 (P005717) — 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.