Position in chronology
UET 2, 0217
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged administrative tablet from the Early Dynastic city of Ur, dating to roughly 2900–2500 BCE. It records quantities of goods — likely vessels (DUG) and rations or allocations (GAR) — against numerical notations in the archaic sexagesimal system used before cuneiform became fully syllabic. The majority of the text is broken away or illegible, but the surviving entries follow the standard format of proto-cuneiform accounting: number, commodity, and category label. Tablets like this were the bureaucratic backbone of early Mesopotamian temple and palace economies, tracking the flow of goods through institutional storehouses.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads something like: a quantity notation followed by a geographic or institutional label ('the land'); then 1 unit 2 sub-units of a vessel type; then 4 units of a quality-graded allocation or ration. The remaining lines — at least four more entries — are too broken to read. This is a fragment of a larger accounting record, and most of the original information is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] X KALAM~a 1(N19) 2(N04) , DUG~a 4(N19)# , KAL~b2# GAR [...] [...] X [...] [...] X 1(N19) [...] [...] [...] 1(N19)# [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X KALAM~a 1(N19) 2(N04) , DUG~a 4(N19)# , KAL~b2# GAR [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] X 1(N19) [...] , [...] , [...] 1(N19)# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0217. 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 (P005812) — 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.