Position in chronology
UET 2, 0242
About this tablet
A small broken corner of an administrative tablet from the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq, written in the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2900–2700 BCE — among the earlier stages of writing, when signs were still close to pictures and numbers were pressed into the clay with a round stylus. The surviving boxes of text preserve scattered words — a jar sign, a calf, terms for officials or overseers — but every numerical entry is lost. It was once part of the everyday bookkeeping of an early urban institution, tallying goods or animals against named persons or offices.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a scrap of an ancient account ledger. Each surviving box once paired a quantity with an item and a responsible party, but the numbers have all broken away. What remains reads roughly: something counted 'before' or by a witness; an entry involving a jar and a senior (perhaps female) official; an entry mentioning a 'lady' or mistress — a title or goddess; then a storage bin and a calf (or a junior staff member); another entry for the overseer; and a final damaged entry qualified as 'mixed.' The rest of the tablet, including the back, is blank or lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary account in case-lines) [...] , [...] ... IGI IGI [...] , [...] ... jar(-sign compounded with HI), AMA-b (senior/female functionary?) [...] , [...] ... NIN (lady/mistress — title or divine name) [...] , [...] ... (illegible sign) ... , UB AMAR — storage-bin(?) (and) calf (or: junior person) ... , AMA-b ... HI (mixed?) ... , HI HI(?) ... (remainder broken; reverse uninscribed)
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
[...] , [...] IGI IGI [...] , [...] |DUG~axHI| AMA~b [...] , [...] NIN [...] , [...] X , UB AMAR , AMA~b# HI# , HI# HI#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0242. 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 (P005837) — 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.