Position in chronology
UET 2, 0225
About this tablet
A large livestock account from the city of Ur in the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2700–2500 BCE, excavated by Leonard Woolley and now in the British Museum. A scribe has tallied very big herds — entries run into the hundreds — of calves, oxen, and 'mixed' young animals, sorted into categories that we can only partly decipher. It is a snapshot of institutional wealth on the hoof: some temple or palace estate at Ur controlled thousands of animals, and this tablet is the ledger that kept track of them.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a herd inventory, category by category: 280 of one kind (label lost), 380 of another, 140 large calves or oxen, 210 delivered as a mixed lot, 130 mixed calves, 380 in a 'processed' category, 180 and 360 under headings we can no longer read with certainty, 480 calves belonging to the household, 210 and 180 more under damaged labels, and roughly 100 in a broken entry. The reverse adds 380 animals kept on fodder(?), 360 head simply listed as 'calves,' and a final lot of 300. All told, the tablet accounts for several thousand animals under a single administration.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 4 sixties 4 tens (= 280) [commodity lost], 6 sixties 2 tens (= 380) [commodity lost], 2 sixties 2 tens (= 140), large calves — oxen(?), 3 sixties 3 tens (= 210), mixed(?) — delivered(?), 2 sixties 1 ten (= 130), mixed calves, 6 sixties 2 tens (= 380), AN — 'made/processed'(?), 3 sixties (= 180), 'large' — A(?), 6 sixties (= 360), A — wood/tree(?), 8 sixties (= 480), calves of the house(?), 3 sixties 3 tens (= 210), A — [sign illegible], 3 sixties (= 180), A — wood/tree(?), 10 tens(?) (= 100?) [...] — [entry lost], (reverse) 6 sixties 2 tens (= 380), fodder-plant(?) — horn(?), 6 sixties (= 360), calves — calves, 5 sixties (= 300) [commodity lost].
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
4(N34@f) 4(N14@f) , 6(N34@f) 2(N14@f) , 2(N34@f) 2(N14@f) , AMAR GAL~a GU4? 3(N34@f) 3(N14@f) , HI? DU? 2(N34@f) 1(N14@f) , HI AMAR 6(N34@f) 2(N14@f) , AN AK~a 3(N34@f) , GAL~a A 6(N34@f) , A GISZ? 8(N34@f) , E2~a? AMAR 3(N34@f) 3(N14@f) , A# X 3(N34@f) , A GISZ? 10(N14@f)#? [...] , [...] 6(N34@f) 2(N14@f) , U2~a? SI 6(N34@f) , AMAR AMAR 5(N34@f) ,
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0225. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005821) — 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.