Position in chronology
UET 2, 0221
About this tablet
This is a small, heavily damaged Early Dynastic administrative tablet from the ancient city of Ur (southern Iraq), probably dating to around 2600–2400 BCE. It records quantities of livestock — sheep and a calf — alongside associated commodities such as fodder and a building or storehouse, under what appear to be institutional accounts. Tablets like this were the everyday paperwork of temple or palace economies, tracking animals and goods as they moved in and out of storage. Its fragmentary state means we can recover only a handful of entries, but even these scraps reveal the meticulous record-keeping habits of the world's earliest scribes.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Five sheep have been processed and recorded — the entry is marked as either negated or voided. Seven units of something (possibly partridges or a split category of goods) are linked to a storehouse, with fodder and a calf. A later entry, badly damaged, records a larger quantity — roughly one large unit, four medium units, and two small units — before the tablet breaks off. The rest of the entries are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 sheep — processed/worked, [garden/measured?], negated(?); [...] [...] X; 7 [units] — partridge(?)/split(?) — storehouse — fodder — [water?] — calf; [...] 1(N14) [...]; [...]; [...]; [...] 1(N34)# 4(N14) 2(N01) — X [...]; [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
5(N01) , UDU~a AK~a SAR~a NU [...] , [...] X 7(N01) , DAR~a E2~a U2~a A AMAR [...] 1(N14) , [...] , [...] , [...] [...] 1(N34)# 4(N14) 2(N01) , X [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0221. 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 (P005817) — 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.