Position in chronology
UET 2, 0272
About this tablet
A small, badly broken clay tablet from the Early Dynastic city of Ur, now held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. What survives is a list of signs — probably a school lexical exercise or an early administrative record — recording commodity categories or institutional categories alongside classifiers such as 'head' (SAG) and a high-status title (EN). The tablet belongs to the very earliest stratum of Sumerian writing, when the script was still partly pictographic and scribes were learning to organize goods and persons under standardized sign-categories. Its fragmentary state makes a definitive reading impossible, but it is a valuable witness to early literacy practice at one of ancient Iraq's most important cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives here is a short list, each entry pairing some commodity or category on the left with a classifier or title on the right. One line records something to do with bricks or wool; another has a 'dark' item classified as a 'head' (person or overseer); a third repeats an egg or seed sign twice before 'head.' A fourth line mentions what may be a cattle-stall or institutional unit followed by an unreadable sign. Near the end, a negation particle or personal name element precedes the title 'lord' or 'high priest.' The rest of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] brick/wool? [...] black/dark? head [...] egg-sign egg-sign head [...] cattle-stall/sea? [NN] [...] [...] [...] not/NU lord/EN [...] [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] SIG4 [...] , GI6#? SAG [...] , NUNUZ~c NUNUZ~c SAG [...] , AB~a X [...] [...] , [...] , NU EN~a [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0272. 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 (P005862) — 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.