Position in chronology
UET 2, 0147
About this tablet
A small clay fragment from Ur — a bullet-shaped tag or the corner of an archaic account tablet, written around 2800 BCE in the earliest phase of Sumerian writing. What survives is a list: a row of round punched numerals, each standing for one unit, set beside titles and short name-signs — a governor (ensi), an overseer, a temple administrator (sanga). Whether the units counted are animals, workers, or rations is no longer recoverable, since the commodity heading at the top is broken away. It is bookkeeping in its infancy: the accountant's marks are still impressions of a round stylus rather than fully formed wedges.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The top of the tablet is broken; the surviving words there mention sheep and, further down, a figure written AMA — a senior woman or a breeding animal. Then comes the tally itself: one unit charged to the governor, one to the overseer-lord of the district, one to a man or office written AK…GAN×HI, one to NU-È-ŠÀ-TA, one to PA-HI-A, and one to the temple administrator, marked 'calf' or 'junior'. A final line follows but is too damaged to read, and the rest of the surface is gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, upper section — broken) [...] , [...] sheep [...] , [...] [...] , [...] (illegible sign) [...] , LA(?) — AMA (female overseer / dam) 1 (unit) — the ensi (governor/city-ruler) 1 (unit) — PA-EN-KI (the overseer-lord of the place) 1 (unit) — AK ... |GAN×HI| [...] GUR(?) 1 (unit) — NU-È-ŠÀ-TA 1 (unit) — PA-HI-A 1 (unit) — the sanga-official — AMAR (calf / junior) [...] , [...] (the remainder of the surface is lost)
Our translation engine — Opus 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
[...] , [...] UDU~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X , LA~e#? AMA~b 1(N01@f) , ENSI 1(N01@f) , PA~a EN~a KI 1(N01@f)# , AK~a X |GAN~dxHI| [...] GUR? 1(N01@f) , NU E3~a SZA3~a1 TA~f 1(N01@f)# , PA~a HI A 1(N01@f) , SANGA~a AMAR , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0147. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad, Iraq (P005729) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.