Position in chronology
UET 2, 0039
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged administrative tablet from the city of Ur, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2900–2350 BCE), making it among the earliest written records from that site. It records counts of people or commodities assigned to named categories — including what appears to be the estate of the moon-god Nanna, Ur's patron deity — alongside a designation for a dairy or food-production official. Tablets like this are the bureaucratic backbone of early Mesopotamian city life: temple administrators tracking allocations of rations or workers. Because it is so fragmentary, only a handful of entries survive, but even these scraps confirm the institutional role of Ur's great temple in organizing labor and supplies at an extraordinarily early date.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too broken to reconstruct fully, but what survives records several groups of workers or ration recipients assigned to institutional categories. One entry lists 40 individuals classified as dependents or servants under a heading that may denote a dairy official or overseer-in-chief. Another entry — partly broken — counts 10 people associated with the Nanna temple estate. The remaining lines give further numbers (10, 30, and small quantities of 2) against headings that are now lost. The rest is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] GARA2~a, PA~a, GAL~a ('dairy/cream official — overseer — great/chief') 4(N14) — UR~a, SAG ('40 — servant/dependent, head/person') [...] 1(N14)# — NANNA~a, SAG ('[...] 10 — Nanna(-estate), head/person') 1(N14) — [...] ('10 — [...]') 3(N14) — [...] ('30 — [...]') 2(N22)? — [...] ('2(?) — [...]') 2(N01)# — [...] ('2(?) — [...]')
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , GARA2~a PA~a GAL~a 4(N14) , UR~a SAG [...] 1(N14)# , NANNA~a SAG 1(N14) , [...] 3(N14) , [...] 2(N22)? , [...] 2(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0039. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005612) — 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.
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.