Position in chronology
UET 2, 0240
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from the archaic levels of Ur, around 2800 BCE — among the earliest written documents from that city. It is a tally: single units of animals (a calf, a pig), a female figurine, and other items or perhaps named individuals, each marked with the numeral 'one.' Writing at this stage was still terse and telegraphic, so we cannot always tell whether a sign cluster names a thing or a person. Tablets like this show accounting, not literature, as the driving force behind early writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short checklist, one item per line, each counted as a single unit: one calf; one female figurine; one pig (the entry adds a further sign, perhaps a qualifier or a name); then a line too broken to read; one item of the 'yellow-green' quality grade, marked as female, with a further designation; and one final entry — a doubled sign 'lam-lam' — also tagged with the quality grade. Whether these lines count animals and objects or list people by name is impossible to say for certain; the middle of the list is lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 1 (unit) — a calf, "Amar-amar"; 1 (unit) — a female figurine (SAL ALAN); 1 (unit) — a pig, "Šaḫ-šaḫ-aš"; (Break) [...] — [...] ...; 1 (unit) — SIG7 (quality-grade), female, IGI-BUR; 1 (unit) — "Lam-lam," SIG7 (quality-grade).
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(N01@f) , AMAR AMAR 1(N01@f) , SAL ALAN~a 1(N01@f) , SZAH2~a SZAH2~a ASZ2 [...] , [...] X 1(N01@f) , SIG7 SAL IGI BUR~a 1(N01@f) , LAM~c LAM~c SIG7
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0240. 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 (P005835) — 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.