Position in chronology
UET 2, 0240
About this tablet
This is a small Early Dynastic administrative or lexical tablet from Ur, dating to roughly 2900–2600 BCE, recording entries that combine numerical notations with groups of signs — animals (calves, pigs), human categories (women/female designations), and object or quality terms (statue, bowl, a yellow-green quality marker). It belongs to a class of early Mesopotamian texts that hover between administrative tally and scribal list or lexical exercise. Whether these entries record actual commodities and personnel, or form part of a sign-list being practised by a scribe, is difficult to determine from the preserved text alone. The tablet comes from Ur, one of the great cities of ancient Sumer, and is now held in Philadelphia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records six entries, each marked with a single unit count. The first notes two calves; the second pairs a woman with a statue or figurine; the third counts pigs — two together plus one more. The fourth line is too damaged to read. The fifth combines a quality marker (yellow-green), a woman, and a bowl or vessel. The sixth records two LAM-category items also marked yellow-green. Whether these are ration records, animal tallies, or scribal list exercises is not entirely clear from what survives.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 unit — calf, calf 1 unit — woman (SAL), statue/figurine (ALAN~a) 1 unit — pig (ŠAḪ2), pig (ŠAḪ2), one (additional) [...] — [...] X 1 unit — yellow-green (SIG7), woman (SAL), eye/face (IGI), vessel/bowl (BUR~a) 1 unit — LAM~c, LAM~c, yellow-green (SIG7)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(N01@f) , AMAR AMAR 1(N01@f) , SAL ALAN~a 1(N01@f) , SZAH2~a SZAH2~a ASZ2 [...] , [...] X 1(N01@f) , SIG7 SAL IGI BUR~a 1(N01@f) , LAM~c LAM~c SIG7
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0240. 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 (P005835) — 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.