Position in chronology
UET 2, 0285
About this tablet
A small administrative account from the very dawn of writing at Ur, in the Early Dynastic period (c. 2800 BCE). It records quantities — tens and single units — of barley and other goods or land parcels, with quality grades attached, but the surface is so worn that the specific transaction and the people involved are lost. Tablets like this are the everyday bookkeeping of one of the world's first cities, showing scribes counting commodities centuries before connected sentences were regularly written down.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger entry: ten units of something now illegible, then ten more units of what seems to be barley, followed by a line involving a bread-or-ration measure and a field marked as 'mixed'. Then two units of first-quality goods, three units of something lost, and a final entry describing items as 'perfect' or 'fattened' — perhaps livestock. The rest of each line is too damaged to read, so we can count the quantities but no longer know exactly what was being counted or for whom.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 10 [...] ... [...] 10 ..., barley(?) [...] ..., AN, (a bread/ration measure: NINDA2×1(N06)), (field-sign GAN combined with HI, 'mixed') 2 ..., first-quality [...] 3 ..., [...] ..., perfect/fattened(?) ... [...] (remainder of the tablet uninscribed or lost)
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(N14@f) [...] , [...] 1(N14@f) , SZE~a#? [...] , AN |NINDA2x1(N06)| |GAN~dxHI| 2(N01@f) , SAG# [...] 3(N01@f) , [...] , DU7 X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0285. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005875) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.