Position in chronology
UET 2, 0040
About this tablet
A badly fragmented Early Dynastic tablet from Ur — one of the oldest urban centres in southern Iraq, active around 2600–2400 BCE — preserving what appears to be a proto-cuneiform administrative list. The surviving entries record quantities alongside signs for weapons or implements, a high-status official title (EN), livestock (young animals/calves), and possibly a dairy-production category. The tablet is too damaged to reconstruct a complete transaction, but its format — numerical notations paired with commodity and personnel signs — is typical of the institutional record-keeping used by Sumerian temples and palaces to track goods, animals, and labour. It is historically interesting as a rare material witness to the earliest stages of writing at Ur itself.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a broken administrative list: quantities of items — including some kind of weapon or implement (three units), an official of high rank, calves or young animals, and possibly a dairy official — recorded alongside damaged or missing entries. One entry notes a single unit of what may be a dairy product or the title of someone in charge of dairy production. The rest of the lines are too broken to read. The tablet was a record of goods or personnel allocations maintained by a temple or palace institution at ancient Ur.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] received/in hand [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] person/worker [...] , [...] day/sun [...] X , dagger-weapon 3(N14) , ritual-weapon SZITA~c [LAK350] [...] , [...] lord/high-priest [...] , [...] X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] young animal/calf [...] , [...] young animal/calf 1(N14) [...] , [...] dairy-product official?
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] SZU# [...] , [...] X , [...] X LU2 [...] , [...] U4# [...] X , GIR2~a 3(N14@f) , SZITA~c LAK350 [...] , [...] EN~a# [...] , X [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] AMAR# [...] , [...] AMAR 1(N14@f)# [...] , [...] GARA2~a#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0040. 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 (P005613) — 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.