Position in chronology
UET 2, 0257
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Ur, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2900–2350 BCE). It records quantities of commodities — apparently sheep and a dairy product, with personnel or supervisory categories — using the archaic numerical notation typical of the earliest written records from southern Mesopotamia. The tablet is so fragmentary that no single transaction can be fully reconstructed, but the surviving signs are consistent with the kind of livestock and ration accounts that temple or palace administrators kept at Ur. It is a glimpse into the very earliest bureaucratic paperwork, written before the Sumerian language was fully rendered in writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries record individual units against various goods and personnel categories: one unit involving a worker or person category; one unit of sheep (listed twice, perhaps two animals); one unit associated with what appears to be a fire/fuel category, a supervisory title, an overseer, a wooden item or wood product, and a dairy product such as cream or ghee. Several lines are too broken to read. The final legible entry records three large units of something now lost. The rest of the tablet is destroyed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N01@f) [vessel/unit], X [...] LU2 [...] 1(N01@f) [vessel/unit], sheep sheep [...] 1(N01@f) [vessel/unit], NE~a PAP~a PA~a GISZ~v GARA2~a [...] , [...] 1(N01@f) [vessel/unit], X [...] 3(N14@f) [large unit], [...]
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)# , X [...] LU2 [...] 1(N01@f) , UDU~a UDU~a# [...] 1(N01@f) , NE~a PAP~a PA~a GISZ~v GARA2~a# [...] , [...] 1(N01@f)# , X [...] 3(N14@f) , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0257. 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 (P005852) — 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.