Position in chronology
UET 2, 0272
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative tablet from the ancient city of Ur, written in the Early Dynastic period, nearly five thousand years ago. Each line once recorded a quantity of goods — bricks, eggs or roe, and other commodities graded 'first quality' — delivered to or handled by an institution, possibly under a lord or temple official. The numbers are lost to breakage, but the fragment shows the bookkeeping habits of one of the world's earliest cities: everything counted, everything graded.
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 warehouse ledger. What survives reads roughly: so many bricks; a quantity of some black-graded item, top quality; eggs (or fish roe), top quality; something connected with a cattle-stall or storehouse; then an entry that may mention a lord or may have been cancelled. The quantities themselves stood in the broken left-hand column and are gone. The rest of the tablet, including the back, is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] , [...] brick(s) [...] , black(?) — first quality [...] , eggs, eggs — first quality [...] , cattle-stall(?) ... [...] [...] , [...] , ... NU(?) the lord(?) [...] [...] , [...] (remainder broken; the reverse and edges preserve no legible continuous text)
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
[...] , [...] SIG4 [...] , GI6#? SAG [...] , NUNUZ~c NUNUZ~c SAG [...] , AB~a X [...] [...] , [...] , NU EN~a [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0272. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P005862) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.