Position in chronology
UET 2, 0229
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, probably dating to around 2700–2500 BCE, recording quantities of goods or rations distributed to or under several institutional categories — including personnel associated with a 'lord' (EN), a worker or person category (LU2), and what may be a storehouse or institutional building (E2) with a 'great/large' qualifier and a 'calf' or junior-status entry. The tablet is compact and pillow-shaped — typical of the earliest administrative records from southern Mesopotamia — and is held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. It is too fragmentary to reconstruct the full transaction, but it clearly belongs to the tradition of institutional bookkeeping at the temple or palace level. Museum number UET 2, 0229 places it within the great excavation archive from Leonard Woolley's work at Ur.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening lines are too damaged to read. Then the tablet records roughly 11 units of something allocated under the category of 'water/liquid (A), SI, and the lord (EN)'; 15 units of LAL3 (a syrup or honey commodity) for workers (LU2); and 15 units of something described as 'great water/liquid (A GAL), calf/young (AMAR), and the storehouse (E2).' A ruling line closes the tablet. The rest is too broken to recover.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] GAR [...] x [...] 1(N14@f) 1(N01) — A SI EN GAR[?] — [~11 units] 1(N14@f) 5(N01@f) — LAL3 LU2 — [~15 units] 1(N14@f) 5(N01@f) — A GAL AMAR E2 — [~15 units] [ruling line / end of tablet]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] GAR# [...] , X [...] 1(N14@f) 1(N01) , A# SI EN~a A? 1(N14@f) 5(N01@f) , LAL3~b LU2 1(N14@f) 5(N01@f) , A GAL~a AMAR E2~a ,
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0229. 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 (P005825) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.