Position in chronology
UET 2, 0287
About this tablet
A small, badly battered administrative tablet from Ur in the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2600–2500 BCE — among the earlier written records from that famous city. Only fragments of four entries survive, but the recognizable words (barley, a date palm, an animal stall, and the title 'lord') mark it as a piece of economic bookkeeping: quantities of goods tallied under an official or institution. The numbers that began each line are broken away, leaving only the skeleton of the accounts. Even in this ruined state it testifies to the scribal administration that ran Ur's temple and palace economy centuries before its royal tombs were built.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger, but the amounts are gone — every line originally opened with a number that has broken off the tablet. What remains reads like column stubs from an account book: one entry involving something 'therein'; one for barley, apparently received; one listing a horn(?), something connected with a stall or institution, and a date palm; and a final line naming 'the lord,' presumably the official or institution the goods belonged to or were delivered to. The rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, all quantities broken away) [... (number lost)] ... TA, NAM, therein (ŠA) [... (number lost)] ... barley, NA, received(?) (ŠU2), therein (ŠA) [... (number lost)] horn(?), AMA(?), NUN(?), cattle-stall(?), date palm [... (number lost)] ... the lord (EN) (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
[...] , [...] TA~f NAM~c SZA3~a1 [...] , [...] SZE~a# NA~a |SZU2.2(N57)| SZA3~a1 [...] , SI AMA~b NUN~a? AB~a GISZIMMAR~b1# [...] , [...] EN~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0287. 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 (P005877) — 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.