Position in chronology
UET 2, 0155
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative tablet from the ancient city of Ur, written in the Early Dynastic period (early third millennium BCE). The surviving entries record small quantities of goods — apparently including a dairy product — alongside personnel or officials, among them a temple administrator. Though too fragmentary to reconstruct the full transaction, it is a piece of the everyday bookkeeping of one of Mesopotamia's oldest cities, from the era when writing was still largely an accounting tool.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads like scraps of a ledger: an entry of 4 of something, another of 1 unit connected with a chief official and possibly female workers, another single unit assigned to the temple administrator, and a line mentioning a dairy product, perhaps cream. Further down, after badly damaged lines, there is one more unit of some measure and an entry of 3 of something else. Everything else — what exactly was counted, for whom, and why — is lost to the breaks in the clay.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) [...] 4 (units) ..., LA [...] [...] 1 (N08 unit), the chief(?) ..., female(?) ..., GIR2 [...] [...] 1 (unit), the temple administrator ..., TAR, DA [...] [...] , ... TU, cream/dairy product [...] [...] , [...] ... [...] , [...] 1 (N22 unit) , [...] , [...] 3 (units) [...] , [...] (remainder broken)
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
[...] 4(N01)# , LA~e# [...] [...] 1(N08) , GAL~a SAL GIR2~a [...] 1(N01) , SANGA~a# TAR~d DA~a [...] , X TU~b GARA2~a [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] 1(N22) , [...] , [...] 3(N01) [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0155. 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 (P005738) — 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.