Position in chronology
UET 2, 0145
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative tablet from the city of Ur, written in the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2900–2600 BCE — among the earliest written documents from that city. The surviving entries are bookkeeping: quantities of goods or animals (including a batch of thirty small livestock and mention of a calf) tallied against households, a courtyard, and even 'the king'. Though too damaged to reconstruct the full transaction, it shows an urban institution at Ur already keeping careful written accounts centuries before the city's famous royal tombs.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads like a page from a ledger: seven of something assigned under a KAL-heading; another damaged entry with a GAR notation; thirty head of small livestock; something connected with a house or estate; an entry involving the courtyard and a calf; then, after several unreadable lines, a mention of 'the great king' (or 'the king — large ...'). The rest of the entries preserve only their numbers — a batch of ten-plus, another ten, three of something, and ten more — with the commodities they counted lost to the breaks. The tablet is shattered, and most of what it once accounted for cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 7 (units) [...] — KAL(-worker/quality?) ... GAR; [...] — NI(?) ... GAR; 30 (units) — gir-animals(?); — BU ... house(?) [...]; — courtyard(?) ... calf/young animal; [...] — ... [...]; [...] — [...]; — the king, great(?) [...]; [...] — [...]; [...] — [...]; 10+ [...] — [...]; 10 [...] — [...]; 3 (units) — ... [...]; 10 [...] — [...]. (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
7(N01@f) [...] , KAL~b2 GAR# [...] , NI~b#? GAR# 3(N14@f) , GIR2~a#? , BU~a X E2~a [...] , KISAL~b1? X AMAR [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] , LUGAL GAL~a# [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14@f)# [...] , [...] 1(N14@f) [...] , [...] 3(N01@f) , X X [...] 1(N14@f) [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0145. 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 (P005727) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.