Position in chronology
UET 2, 0344
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative fragment from Early Dynastic Ur, roughly 2600 BCE, excavated at Tell Muqayyar and now in Philadelphia. What survives is the tail end of a list: entries whose quantities are lost but whose commodities or recipients can partly be read — small livestock, wine, birds, possibly a physician, and what looks like the personal name Ušumgal. It is a scrap of the everyday bookkeeping of one of the world's earliest cities, from the era just before Ur's famous royal tombs.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger page with the numbers torn away. Each line once recorded an amount of something delivered or disbursed: one entry seems to involve small stock animals, another mentions someone who may be a physician, one names a man called Ušumgal, one records wine, and the last counts birds. Everything before each item — the quantities and probably the first entries of the list — is lost, and the rest of the tablet is broken off.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse — column of entries, each preceded by a lost numeral) [...] : [...] ... (sign illegible) [...] : [...] gir-animals(?) ... URI-IB(?) [...] : [...] ... NU, the physician(?) [...] : Ušumgal-a (personal name?) [...] : [...] wine [...] : [...] bird(s) (remainder of the tablet 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
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] GIR2~a# |URI3~a+IB~a|# [...] , [...] NU AZU? [...] , USZUMGAL A [...] , [...] GESZTIN~c [...] , [...] MUSZEN
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0344. 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 (P005931) — 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.