Position in chronology
UET 2, 0135bis
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged Early Dynastic tablet from Ur — one of the oldest cities in the world — recording what appears to be an administrative list of agricultural commodities and institutional categories: wine or grapes, date-palms, a plow-team or plowing activity, and references to a storehouse and a temple administrator (sanga). Tablets like this are the ancient world's equivalent of a stockroom ledger, tracking goods managed by temple institutions at Ur around 2600–2400 BCE. The text is too fragmentary to reconstruct a full transaction, but the combination of a sanga official, a field unit, and fruit commodities strongly suggests temple-estate agriculture. It is a rare survival of early administrative literacy from one of Mesopotamia's most important sacred cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving lines list institutional goods under the care of a temple administrator: grapes or wine, date-palms, what may be a plow-team, and references to a storehouse and a field. A quantity — two units of something — is noted alongside what appears to be a processed or bundled commodity. The final line mentions a field, more grapes or wine, and water. Much of the tablet is broken away, and several entries cannot be read with confidence.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] storehouse(?) [...] [...] temple-administrator, grapes/wine [...] 2(N14), bundle(?) RA processed/made [...] date-palm, mother(?) vessel(?), horn(?), plow(-team?) [...] X field, grapes/wine, water
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X E2~a#? [...] , [...] SANGA~a# GESZTIN~c [...] 2(N14) , KESZ2 RA AK~a [...] , GISZIMMAR~b1# AMA~b BUR~a# SI APIN~a [...] , X GAN2 GESZTIN~c A
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0135bis. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005716) — 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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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.