Position in chronology
UET 2, 0033
About this tablet
A heavily damaged early-dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, dating to roughly 2900–2500 BCE, recording small quantities of commodities or livestock under institutional management. The surviving entries list numerical totals — 7, 9, and 5 units — alongside signs that likely refer to young animals (calves), storage buildings, garden produce, and container types. Tablets like this formed the backbone of temple or palace accounting at ancient Ur, tracking the flow of goods through a major Sumerian institution. The fragmentary state means the specific transaction, the responsible official, and the commodity categories cannot all be firmly identified.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet records a few short accounting entries: seven units of something connected to a young animal and a storehouse; nine units associated with a garden plot or measure; five units of young animals tied to a specific type of jar or vessel. A further entry mentions pigs or a pig official, and one more line is too broken to read. The overall impression is a routine stock-take or disbursement record — the ancient equivalent of a warehouse logbook entry — tallying livestock or produce against institutional storage at Ur.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] [...] [...] pig(-herder/commodity)? [...] 7 (units), young animal(s) X storehouse/building [...] 9 (units), garden/plot MA [...] 5 (units), young animal(s) [in/of] vessel-jar [...] [...] X mixed/qualified?
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] [...] , [...] SZAH2~a#? [...] 7(N14) , AMAR X E2~a [...] 9(N14) , SAR~a MA [...] 5(N14) , AMAR |DUG~axHI| [...] , [...] X HI#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0033. 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 (P005606) — 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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.