Position in chronology
UET 2, 0155
About this tablet
A badly damaged Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, recording quantities of commodities or personnel under named institutional officials. The surviving lines mention a female worker or female designation alongside a blade sign, a sanga temple administrator, and what appears to be a dairy product (GARA2, likely butter or cream). Too fragmentary to reconstruct a full transaction, but the tablet belongs to the standard administrative bookkeeping of an Early Dynastic Sumerian institution, probably a temple household at Ur around 2600–2400 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is a damaged list of quantities and categories: one entry records a large number (possibly 4 units) next to a sign we cannot read; another records one unit associated with a woman and a blade; a third records one unit under a temple administrator along with two further designations. A later entry mentions a dairy product, probably butter or cream. The rest of the tablet is too broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 4, LA~e [...]\n[...] 1(N08), large/great woman/female (with) blade/dagger\n[...] 1, sanga(-official) [with] TAR DA\n[...], X TU~b GARA2 (dairy/butter)\n[...], [...] X\n[...], [...]\n1(N22), [...]\n, [...]\n3 [...], [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] 4(N01)# , LA~e# [...] [...] 1(N08) , GAL~a SAL GIR2~a [...] 1(N01) , SANGA~a# TAR~d DA~a [...] , X TU~b GARA2~a [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] 1(N22) , [...] , [...] 3(N01) [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0155. 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 (P005738) — 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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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.