Position in chronology
UET 2, 0046
About this tablet
A small, heavily worn Early Dynastic tablet from Ur — one of the earliest phases of Mesopotamian writing, roughly 2900–2500 BCE. It appears to be a fragmentary administrative or accounting record, listing quantities of commodities or institutional categories, possibly including a young animal (AMAR = calf), a courtyard or storage area (KISAL), and a bread or grain product (NINDA2). The surface is so eroded and the text so damaged that most entries cannot be securely read; what survives is a glimpse of the meticulous record-keeping that underpinned early urban temple economies at Ur. The tablet is held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and carries accession number UM 37-07-010.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too fragmentary to reconstruct a continuous account, but the surviving entries appear to record several numerical quantities against institutional or commodity categories: something associated with a courtyard or storehouse and a calf; a larger unit associated with a NUN-type storehouse or designation; a smaller unit with a reed-related entry; and one unit of a bread or grain product made with split wood (or a specific grain variety). Most entries are broken beyond recovery. What remains is the skeleton of a temple or household accounting list from one of the world's oldest cities.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N45)# [...] , [...] , [...] 3(N14)# [...] , [...] , KISAL~b1#? AMAR 1(N45) , NUN~a IG~a X 1(N14) , GI4~b X , X AB~a X 1(N34) , |NINDA2x(GISZ.DAR~a)|
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(N45)# [...] , [...] , [...] 3(N14)# [...] , [...] , KISAL~b1#? AMAR 1(N45) , NUN~a IG~a X 1(N14) , GI4~b X , X AB~a X 1(N34) , |NINDA2x(GISZ.DAR~a)|
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0046. 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 (P005619) — 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.