Position in chronology
UET 2, 0207
About this tablet
A small, heavily fragmented administrative tablet from Early Dynastic Ur (modern Tell Muqayyar in southern Iraq), dating to roughly 2900–2500 BCE. It records quantities — mostly ones and fives — against a series of categories or personnel designations, including what may be a word for 'statue' or 'image' (ALAN) and a person or animal category (UR). This is proto-cuneiform accounting at its most stripped-down: numbers paired with labels, the earliest form of bureaucratic record-keeping. The tablet is too damaged to reconstruct the full transaction, but it almost certainly comes from a temple or institutional storehouse administration at ancient Ur.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving text lists small quantities against several categories: one unit of something described by a 'day/sun' qualifier, one unit designated as a guard or dog-handler type, five units of what may be statues or images (plus an associated entry), and five units of workers or persons under a partially illegible label. Several lines at the beginning and end are completely lost. The tablet is too broken to recover the full account, but what remains is a short institutional tally — numbers attached to people, objects, or categories in a temple or administrative storeroom at Ur.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] X , [...] 1 (unit) , day/sun [qualifier] ME~a 1 (unit) , UR~a [dog / guard-person]? 5 (units) , ALAN~a [statue/image] + A 5 (units) , LU2 [person/worker] X [...] , [...] 1 (unit) , [...] 1 (unit) , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] X , [...] 1(N01@f) , U4 ME~a 1(N01@f) , UR~a#? 5(N01@f) , ALAN~a A 5(N01@f) , LU2 X [...] , [...] 1(N01@f) , [...] 1(N01@f) , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0207. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005802) — 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.