Position in chronology
UET 2, 0194
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged administrative tablet from Ur dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2900–2350 BCE). It records quantities — 6, 2, 2 — allocated or accounted against institutional roles: a sanga temple administrator paired with a young animal or junior official, a statue or image paired with a female overseer or breeding animal, and an overseer category whose entry is now lost. The tablet is too fragmentary to reconstruct the full transaction, but it belongs to the dense world of Sumerian temple bookkeeping in which every commodity, person, and role was counted and written down.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The first line is too broken to read. What survives records three entries: six units assigned to the temple administrator alongside a calf or junior official; two units linked to a statue or image and a female overseer; two more units under an overseer whose remaining details are lost. The last line is entirely missing. The rest of the tablet is too damaged to recover.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , [...] X inner-store/contents DU# [...] 6 , sanga-official — calf/young animal 2 , statue/image — female overseer/dam 2 , overseer/PA 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 SZA3~a1 DU# [...] 6(N01@f)# , SANGA~a AMAR 2(N01@f) , ALAN~a AMA~b 2(N01@f) , PA~a X [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0194. 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 (P005785) — 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.