Position in chronology
UET 2, 0077
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, recording allocations or deductions of dairy and food commodities against named quantities. The surviving entries list numeric totals — 5, 3, and 2 units of goods — alongside signs for dairy products, a mouth/ration marker, and what may be an institutional or title term. At roughly 4,500 years old, even this fragment of a routine temple or palace account gives a glimpse of the sophisticated bookkeeping that kept one of the world's first cities fed and organized. The tablet is now in the British Museum, excavated at the ancient city of Ur in modern Iraq.
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 read in full, but what survives records quantities of food goods: 5 units of a large dairy product (perhaps butter or cream), 3 units of something alongside more dairy, and 2 units assigned to a high official or storehouse. An earlier line mentions some kind of deduction or deficit against another food item. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] LUM KA-opening, deficit/deduction [...] 5 (units), large cream/dairy product [...] 3 (units), garlic/onion, cream/dairy, garlic/onion [...] 2 (units), [category marker?], prince/NUN-storehouse [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] LUM# KA~a LA2 [...] 5(N19@f)# , GARA2~a GAL~a [...] 3(N19@f) , SUM~b GARA2~a SUM~b [...] 2(N19@f) , ME~a#? NUN~a# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0077. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005651) — 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.