Position in chronology
UET 2, 0136bis
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged administrative tablet from the Early Dynastic period at Ur (modern Tell Muqayyar, southern Iraq), probably dating to around 2700–2500 BCE. It records numerical entries in the archaic sexagesimal notation alongside the SAG sign, which in this accounting context likely marks persons, recipients, or a commodity category. The surviving lines suggest a tally — perhaps of people, rations, or labor units — typical of the temple or palace bookkeeping that sustained the earliest cities. Its fragmentary state prevents a full reconstruction, but it belongs to the same tradition of proto-literate record-keeping that gave rise to writing itself.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet reads as a short list of numbers: one entry records a quantity of roughly 55 units (using the large and medium numerical signs), followed by a broken designation; another line gives about 32 units beside a 'head/person' classifier; a third and fourth line each carry the same person-marker with a smaller quantity and further text now lost. The last line is entirely gone. The rest of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5(N19@f) 5(N04@f), X [...] [...] 3(N19@f) 2(N04@f), SAG# [...] [...], SAG# [...] [...] 2(N14@f)#?, SAG# [...] [...], [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
5(N19@f) 5(N04@f) , X [...] [...] 3(N19@f) 2(N04@f) , SAG# [...] [...] , SAG# [...] [...] 2(N14@f)#? , SAG# [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0136bis. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005718) — 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.