Position in chronology
UET 2, 0154
About this tablet
A small, badly battered accounting tablet from the city of Ur, written in the Early Dynastic period, some 4,500–4,800 years ago. Only scraps of five lines survive: numbers written with archaic numerical impressions, alongside signs pointing to deliveries and to the 'courtyard' — likely an institutional storehouse or temple precinct receiving the goods. It is too damaged to say what commodity was being counted, but it is a genuine piece of the world's earliest bookkeeping tradition, excavated at Tell Muqayyar and now in the British Museum.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What remains is a ledger fragment: one unit of something assigned under a PA mark (perhaps an overseer's category), then two more units connected with a delivery — possibly by boat or in a container, possibly involving oil or fat. A third entry is illegible except for a single sign. The last two readable entries record ten units and then two units, both booked to 'the courtyard,' apparently the institutional facility receiving them. Everything else — what the goods were, who handled them — is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) [...] 1 (N22 unit) — PA (overseer/category mark) [...] 2 (N22 units)(?) [...] — DU MA NI (delivered(?) ... container(?) ... oil/fat(?)) [...] (illegible sign) — A [...] [...] 1 (N14 unit, = 10) — the courtyard (KISAL) [...] [...] 2 (N01 units) — the courtyard (KISAL) [...] (remainder broken; reverse uninscribed or lost)
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
[...] 1(N22)# , PA~a [...] 2(N22)#? [...] , DU MA NI~b [...] X , A [...] [...] 1(N14)# , KISAL~b1 [...] [...] 2(N01)# , KISAL~b1 [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0154. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005737) — 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.