Position in chronology
UET 2, 0217
About this tablet
A small, badly worn administrative tablet from the city of Ur, written in the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2800–2600 BCE. It is a bookkeeping record: numbered entries counting jars and grain-measures alongside category labels such as 'the Land' and prepared rations. Too damaged to reconstruct the full transaction, it nonetheless shows the everyday accounting machinery of one of the world's earliest cities — quantities, containers, and rations tallied by an anonymous official.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an accountant's ledger. One surviving entry counts jars — one large measure and two small ones. Another entry records four measures of something classed under the label 'KAL', set down as food rations. A heading mentioning 'the Land' — perhaps an institution or region — stood at the top, but its numbers are lost. Two further entries each begin with a count of one measure, but what was counted has broken away, and several lines in between are entirely illegible. The back of the tablet carries no writing, only the museum's inventory number.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] ... KALAM (the Land?) 1(N19) 2(N04) — jars 4(N19) — KAL, rations (deposited) [...] ... [...] ... 1(N19) [...] — [...] [...] 1(N19) [...] — [...] (remainder lost; reverse uninscribed)
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
[...] , [...] X KALAM~a 1(N19) 2(N04) , DUG~a 4(N19)# , KAL~b2# GAR [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X 1(N19) [...] , [...] , [...] 1(N19)# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0217. 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 (P005812) — 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.