Position in chronology
UET 2, 0370
About this tablet
A heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Early Dynastic city of Ur, now held in Philadelphia. The surviving lines record quantities of commodities or personnel categories — the numerals, together with signs for 'tablet/record,' 'wood/tree,' possibly 'reed,' and personnel markers such as LU2, suggest a temple or institutional account of goods or workers. The tablet is so fragmentary that no single transaction can be fully recovered, but it belongs to the earliest layer of written record-keeping in southern Mesopotamia, a period when scribes were just beginning to encode economic information in clay. Its interest lies less in what it says than in what it represents: bureaucracy at the dawn of writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is a list of quantities and category labels, too broken to reconstruct as a complete transaction. One entry records a number in the range of the sign-cluster 1(N22@f) 1(N58) 3(N01@f) — a specific tally — alongside entries that appear to involve some kind of wood or timber product, reeds, and personnel (LU2, meaning 'people' or 'workers'). A 'tablet/record' marker (DUB~a) appears in one line, possibly indicating this was itself a summary or docket. The rest of the lines are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] SZA3~a1 [...] AK~a [...] [...] X [...] 1(N01@f)# [...] DUB~a# [...] DA~a [...] X X NE~a PAP~a GISZ~v 1(N22@f) 1(N58) 3(N01@f) , KAL~b2? GI RU X LU2 [...] [...] LU2 [...] [...] 1(N14@f)# [...] X [...] [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] SZA3~a1 [...] AK~a [...] , [...] X [...] 1(N01@f)# , [...] DUB~a# [...] DA~a [...] , X X NE~a PAP~a GISZ~v 1(N22@f) 1(N58) 3(N01@f) , KAL~b2? GI RU X LU2 [...] , [...] LU2 [...] , [...] 1(N14@f)# [...] , X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0370. 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 (P005957) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.