Position in chronology
UET 2, 0147
About this tablet
This small clay tablet from Ur, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2900–2350 BCE), is an administrative record listing individuals or categories of personnel alongside a count of one unit each. The entries name institutional roles — a city-ruler (ensi), an overseer (pa), a lord or high priest (en), and a temple administrator (sanga) — alongside some commodity or action terms that remain partially broken. It is essentially ancient bureaucratic paperwork: a tally of officials, rations, or disbursements managed through the temple or palace at Ur. The tablet's small size, punch-mark numerals, and pictographic signs place it among the earliest layers of Sumerian record-keeping, before writing had fully developed into the classical cuneiform system.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The top of the tablet is damaged, but what survives records a series of single-unit entries assigned to named officials or institutional roles: one city-ruler, one overseer and lord at a certain place, one individual associated with a field or processing activity, one connected with an issuing from a storehouse, one overseer with something mixed or watered, and one temple administrator linked to a young animal or calf. The surrounding context — sheep signs, a mother sign, and scattered commodity terms — suggests this is a disbursement or allocation record. The rest is too damaged or fragmentary to reconstruct.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] sheep [...] [...] [...] [...] X [...] LA(?) mother 1, governor/city-ruler (ENSI) 1, overseer (PA~a), lord (EN~a), place (KI) 1, [made/processed] X |GAN~d×HI| [...] [GUR?] 1, NU, [brought out from / issued from] storehouse (E3~a ŠA3~a TA~f) 1, overseer (PA~a), mixed (HI), water/river (A) 1, temple administrator (SANGA~a), calf/young animal (AMAR) [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] UDU~a [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X , LA~e#? AMA~b 1(N01@f) , ENSI 1(N01@f) , PA~a EN~a KI 1(N01@f)# , AK~a X |GAN~dxHI| [...] GUR? 1(N01@f) , NU E3~a SZA3~a1 TA~f 1(N01@f)# , PA~a HI A 1(N01@f) , SANGA~a AMAR , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0147. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad, Iraq (P005729) — 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.