Position in chronology
UET 2, 0124
About this tablet
A heavily damaged early-dynastic administrative tablet from Ur (modern Tell Muqayyar in southern Iraq), dating to roughly 2900–2600 BCE. What survives records numerical quantities — expressed in the archaic N14 numerical notation — alongside signs for 'woman/female worker' (SAL), an institutional building (E2~a), and possibly a ration or life-maintenance allocation (TI). The tablet is too fragmentary to reconstruct a complete transaction, but its format — numbers paired with commodity or personnel categories — is characteristic of the earliest Sumerian administrative bookkeeping. It is a small piece of the vast proto-literate accounting system that made Ur one of the most complex urban centres in the ancient world.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries record a series of quantities assigned to categories or personnel, most of which are now lost. What we can make out: one unit of something unidentified; then four units linked to a female worker (or female category) associated with an institutional building and what may be a ration or life allocation; then two units twice more, each time with the associated details broken away. The rest of the tablet — both the opening lines and the closing lines — is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X X [...] , [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14@f) , X [...] 4(N14@f) [...] , [...] SAL E2~a TI [...] 2(N14@f) [...] , [...] 2(N14@f) [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X X [...] , [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14@f) , X [...] 4(N14@f) [...] , [...] SAL E2~a TI [...] 2(N14@f) [...] , [...] 2(N14@f) [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0124. 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 (P005704) — 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.