Position in chronology
UET 2, 0187
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged early-dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, belonging to the proto-cuneiform scribal tradition. It records quantities of commodities, categories, or institutional assignments — the exact nature of which cannot be recovered from the surviving signs alone. The numerical notations and sign clusters such as KALAM ('the land'), MEN ('crown/tiara'), and IGI ('eye/front') suggest an institutional ledger tracking allocations or inventories of goods or offices. This tablet is a modest but authentic relic of the very earliest Sumerian bureaucratic writing, when scribes at Ur were developing the conventions of numerical record-keeping that would underpin Mesopotamian civilization for millennia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too broken at top and bottom to read completely. What survives is a numbered list: two entries of some category associated with 'the land' and 'crown,' two more entries linked again to 'the land,' three entries involving a container or vessel type alongside a compound sign now partly lost, three entries under the heading IGI (perhaps 'in front of' or a named category), and several single-unit entries whose labels are damaged or missing. Near the end, a larger composite numeral appears before text that is lost, and the final legible entry mentions something small or junior. The rest is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] X HI [...] [...] 2, KALAM MEN A 2, SI KALAM A 3, MA |(ZU&ZU).SAR| X [...] [...] , [...] 3, IGI [...] 1, ME [...] 1, [...] 1, [...] [...] , [...] 1 (large unit) 1 (medium unit) 1 [...] , [...] , TUR X [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , X HI [...] [...] 2(N01@f)# , KALAM~a MEN~a A 2(N01@f) , SI KALAM~a A 3(N01@f) , MA |(ZU&ZU).SAR~a| X [...] [...] , [...] 3(N01@f) , IGI [...] 1(N01@f) , ME~a [...] 1(N01@f) , [...] 1(N01@f)# , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N14@f) 1(N22@f) 1(N01@f) [...] , [...] , TUR X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0187. 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 (P005775) — 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.