Position in chronology
UET 2, 0068b
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, recording allocations of barley and other commodities — including aromatic bread or flavored grain products — distributed to or under various institutional figures, among them an ensi (city governor) and possibly a lugal (king or great lord). The tablet is tiny, lens-shaped, and heavily worn, which is typical of the earliest Sumerian bureaucratic record-keeping at Ur. Such tablets are among the oldest systematic written accounts in human history, capturing the grain economy of a Sumerian temple or palace institution around 2600–2500 BCE. Its fragmentary state leaves several entries and their recipients unrecoverable.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The record shows distributions of barley and aromatic grain products: four units went to the governor, two units of barley to another party, five units of wood (or a wood-related commodity, destination broken away), one unit of aromatic barley, entries under the designations MIR and A, two more units of plain barley under A, and one unit assigned to a great king or lord — the remaining details of that last entry, and everything that followed, are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine4 (units) — barley, aromatic bread/beer — governor 2 (units) — barley 5 (units) — wood, LA~e? [...] 1 (unit) — barley, aromatic bread/beer — MIR~a, A 2 (units) — barley, A 1 (unit) — LUGAL, great [...] RA? PA3 [...] — [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
4(N01@f) , SZE~a |NINDA2xSZIM~a| ENSI 2(N14@f) , SZE~a# 5(N19@f)# , GISZ LA~e? [...] 1(N01@f) , SZE~a |NINDA2xSZIM~a| , MIR~a A 2(N01@f) , SZE~a A 1(N01@f) , LUGAL GAL~a RA? PA3# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0068b. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005642) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.