Position in chronology
UET 2, 0242
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged Early Dynastic tablet from Ur — one of the oldest cities in the ancient world — bearing what appear to be brief administrative or lexical entries. The surviving signs include terms for a vessel type, female titles or roles (AMA~b, NIN), a young animal or junior official (AMAR), and storage or accounting markers (UB, HI). The tablet is fragmentary and its precise subject — whether a ration list, a livestock record, or a lexical exercise — cannot be established with confidence. It is nonetheless a rare witness to the earliest phase of literate record-keeping at Ur.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet lists a handful of entries, each now badly broken at the left. We can make out references to eyes or a personal gaze (IGI IGI), a vessel of some kind containing a mixed substance, a female figure or title (NIN — 'lady'), and a storage compartment holding a young animal or junior official (UB, AMAR). The last legible lines mention a female role (AMA~b) alongside the qualifier 'mixed' or 'blended' (HI), repeated perhaps twice. The rest is lost or illegible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] IGI IGI [...] |DUG~a×HI| AMA~b [...] NIN [...] X UB AMAR AMA~b HI HI HI[?]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] IGI IGI [...] , [...] |DUG~axHI| AMA~b [...] , [...] NIN [...] , [...] X , UB AMAR , AMA~b# HI# , HI# HI#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0242. 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 (P005837) — 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.