Position in chronology
UET 2, 0188
About this tablet
A badly damaged accounting tablet from the very early city of Ur, written around 2800 BCE in the Early Dynastic period. What survives are a few numeral impressions and commodity signs — quantities counted in the archaic number system, an entry for barley, and traces of administrative classifiers. It belongs to the earliest stratum of bookkeeping at Ur, when writing was still largely a tool for tallying goods rather than recording language.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger fragment. One line records a large quantity — one big unit and two tens of something now lost. Another entry mentions an overseer's mark or category, possibly horns or a measured commodity, alongside a festival- or institution-related sign. A third line counts out three, one, and two in mixed units of barley. The last readable traces mention a container or boat sign and one more unidentified item before the tablet breaks off. The bulk of the account is gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) 1(N50)(?) [...] 2(N14) [tens] ... [...] ... PA (overseer/classifying mark), SI (horn?), EZEN-compound sign [...] 3(N34) 1(N50)(?) 2(N01) [units] [...] barley [...] [...] ... MA (container/boat sign), BU [...] ... SI(?) (remainder of the tablet broken away)
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(N50)#? [...] 2(N14) , [...] , PA~a SI |EZEN~axX| [...] 3(N34@f) 1(N50)? 2(N01@f) [...] , SZE~a [...] [...] , [...] MA BU~a# [...] X SI?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0188. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005776) — 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.