Position in chronology
UET 2, 0218
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from the ancient city of Ur, written around 2700–2600 BCE in the Early Dynastic period — among the earlier layers of writing at that site. It records counted quantities of birds, likely fowl delivered to or disbursed from an institutional household. Tablets like this show that long before literature existed, writing was the bookkeeping tool of temple and palace economies, tracking even poultry by the dozen.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a bird ledger. One entry counts fifty-one of something (probably birds, the description is broken), another logs thirty-five birds of a particular kind or handling — the qualifying terms no longer translate cleanly. A further entry records fifty-one more, and a last one ten. The tablet is badly broken, so the labels telling us who supplied or received these birds, and for what occasion, are lost; only the running totals survive.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 51(?) [...] — 1 (stroke) ... bird[s] [...] 35 — birds, DUR₂ BU [...] — [...] 51 [...] — [...] 10 [...] — [...]
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
5(N14@f) 1(N01@f)? [...] , 1(N57) MUSZEN# [...] 3(N14@f) 5(N01@f) , MUSZEN DUR2 BU~a [...] , [...] 5(N14@f)# 1(N01@f)# [...] , [...] 1(N14@f) [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0218. 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 (P005813) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.