Position in chronology
UET 2, 0068a
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Ur, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2900–2350 BCE). It records quantities of commodities — including barley and what may be allocations tied to an institutional building — alongside signs that may designate personnel categories or titled roles. Tablets like this are the earliest form of bureaucratic record-keeping in human history, tracking the flow of goods and people through large Sumerian institutions such as temples or palaces. Too fragmentary to reconstruct a complete transaction, but its columnar layout and numerical notation are characteristic of early Mesopotamian accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet lists a small number of entries in a columnar format. One entry records three units of barley. Another mentions what appears to be a storehouse or institutional building, and another a title or role involving the word 'mother.' The remaining lines contain signs — possibly referring to processed goods, a designation, and an institutional classifier — that are too damaged or too poorly understood to render clearly. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] X AMA~b A 3(N01@f)# , barley [...] , [...] TI# storehouse [...] , [...] SZAGAN#? [...] , [...] AK~a# AN# MUSZ3~a#
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X AMA~b A 3(N01@f)# , SZE~a [...] , [...] TI# E2~a [...] , [...] SZAGAN#? [...] , [...] AK~a# AN# MUSZ3~a#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0068a. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005641) — 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.