Position in chronology
UET 2, 0136
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged archaic administrative tablet from Ur, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2900–2350 BCE). It preserves numerical entries — quantities counted in the large Sumerian number system — alongside what appear to be category labels such as a 'tablet' or record-type marker (DUB~a), a building or storehouse sign (E2~a), and a vessel-related term (IGI BUR~a). This is the kind of bare-bones accounting record that scribes at Ur's temples and storehouses produced by the hundreds: a tally of goods, commodities, or personnel under named institutional headings. Too fragmentary to reconstruct a full transaction, but recognizably part of the bureaucratic machinery that made early Mesopotamian cities run.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records a series of quantities against institutional categories. Two entries survive with reasonable clarity: one notes 21 units associated with what may be a 'tablet' record, a branch, and a classifier; another notes 31 units linked to a storehouse or building, a 'face/front' designation, and a vessel type. The surrounding lines are too broken to read. The overall sense is a running account — a stocktake or allocation list — but the specific commodity and the parties involved are lost in the damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] X X [...] 2(N14) 1(N22) — DUB~a, PA3, DA~a 3(N14) 1(N22) — E2~a(?), IGI, BUR~a [...] [...] 2(N14) 1(N22)(?), [...] [...] 1(N14) [...], [...]
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 , [...] 2(N14) 1(N22) , DUB~a# PA3 DA~a# 3(N14) 1(N22) , E2~a? IGI BUR~a [...] [...] 2(N14)# 1(N22)#? , [...] [...] 1(N14)# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0136. 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 (P005717) — 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.