Position in chronology
UET 2, 0182a
About this tablet
A badly worn administrative account from Ur in the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2800–2600 BCE — bookkeeping from one of the world's first cities. Each line pairs a quantity, punched into the clay with round numeral impressions, with a short label: goods or work connected with a 'new house,' a 'great door,' sheep, and ration categories. The named commodities are mostly lost to damage, but the tablet shows a professional accounting system already in routine use. It is everyday paperwork, not literature — and that ordinariness is exactly what makes it valuable evidence for early urban administration.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger, most of it eaten away by time. What survives reads like a list of deliveries or expenditures: three units of something expended; two large and two small units issued out of store; two tens and four units under an overseer. Then six units connected with the new house, six units for the great door, forty-three units under the tablet office, twenty-three head of sheep, ten-plus units of horn or horned animals, a portion at the door, and a final entry in a bread-ration category. The opening lines, several quantities, and the whole of the reverse are too broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] ... [...] [...] 3 (N04) units — NI, expended(?); 2 (N19) 2 (N04) units — issued(?), from the interior(?), not ...; 2 (N14) 4 (N04) units — the overseer(?) ... [...]; [...] ... [...] 6 (N19) units — [...] (for) the new house; 6 (N19) units — the great door; 4 (N14) 3 (N04) units — chosen(?), tablet(-office?), DA; [...] 2 (N14) 3 (N04) units — sheep, sheep; [...] 1 (N14) [...] units — horn(?) ... [...]; [quantity lost] — [...] BAR-portion(?) (of/at) the door; [quantity lost] — [...] (the sign NINDA2׊IM, a bread/ration category). (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
[...] , [...] [...] 3(N04)# , NI~b# ZI~a 2(N19)# 2(N04) , E3~a SZA3~a1# NU TA~f 2(N14) 4(N04) , PA~a A X [...] [...] , [...] 6(N19) , [...] E2~a GIBIL 6(N19) , GAL~a IG~a 4(N14) 3(N04) , PA3 DUB~a# DA~a [...] 2(N14) 3(N04) , UDU~a# UDU~a [...] 1(N14) [...] , SI# X [...] , [...] BAR IG~a , [...] |NINDA2xSZIM~a|#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0182a. 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 (P005769) — 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.