Position in chronology
UET 2, 0257
About this tablet
A small, badly broken accounting tablet from the Early Dynastic city of Ur, roughly 2900–2600 BCE — among the earliest generations of writing. It records quantities of goods: sheep, some kind of fuel or processed material, timber, and a dairy product, each entry preceded by a numeral. Too damaged to reconstruct the transaction, but it is a piece of the everyday bookkeeping through which Ur's early administrators tracked commodities and the people responsible for them.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger fragment. One unit of something now lost, connected with a 'man of' someone whose name is broken away. One unit of sheep — the entry repeats the sheep sign, but the rest is gone. One unit covering a mixed line of goods: a fuel or fire-related item, two classifying marks, timber, and a dairy product such as cream. Then a whole entry too broken to read, another single unit of an unreadable item, and finally a larger figure of thirty of something — but what was being counted there is lost with the break.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 1 [unit] — ... [...] man of [...] 1 [unit] — sheep, sheep [...] 1 [unit] — NE (fuel?), PAP, PA, timber, cream/dairy product [...] — [...] 1 [unit] — ... [...] 30 (3 × 10) — [...] (remainder broken)
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)# , X [...] LU2 [...] 1(N01@f) , UDU~a UDU~a# [...] 1(N01@f) , NE~a PAP~a PA~a GISZ~v GARA2~a# [...] , [...] 1(N01@f)# , X [...] 3(N14@f) , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0257. 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 (P005852) — 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.