Position in chronology
UET 2, 0172
About this tablet
A badly damaged administrative fragment from Early Dynastic Ur, roughly 2700–2500 BCE, excavated at Tell Muqayyar and now in the Penn Museum. What survives are pieces of at least two ledger entries: numerical notations (13 of something, then 10 of something) followed by commodity signs — possibly wood, a fuel product, and a checking or totaling mark. Too little remains to say what goods were being counted or for whom, but it is a scrap of the everyday bookkeeping that made one of the world's first cities run.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only fragments of an account survive here. One entry records a quantity of thirteen of some commodity, followed by signs too damaged to interpret. The next entry records ten units of something, perhaps qualified by a preparation or category term. A further line lists commodity signs — something 'mixed', a fuel or fire-related item, a wood product — with what may be a check-mark or subtotal notation. The beginning and end of the text, and the left portion of every line, are broken away and lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) [...] ... [...] ... (illegible) [...] 13 (units: 1×N14 + 3×N01) ..., LA?, AN, ... (sign illegible) [...] 10 (units: 1×N14) ..., water(?) / A, TU (category/qualifier, damaged) [...] ..., HI ("mixed"?), NE (fuel/fire sign), PAP (marker/total?), GIŠ (wood) ... [...] [...] ... [...] (rest 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 [...] 1(N14) 3(N01) , LA~e? AN X [...] 1(N14) , A TU~b# [...] , HI NE~a PAP~a GISZ~v X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0172. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P005759) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
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