Position in chronology
UET 2, 0285
About this tablet
A small, heavily worn administrative tablet from Ur, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2900–2350 BCE). It records quantities of commodities — likely barley or grain and bread rations — alongside person or category classifiers, in a format typical of institutional accounting from early Sumerian cities. The tablet is too fragmentary to reconstruct a complete transaction, but its numerical entries and commodity signs fit the pattern of a ration or disbursement record kept by a temple or palace storehouse. It is interesting as a survival of the very earliest tradition of written record-keeping in human history, here practiced at the ancient city of Ur.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records at least two large-unit quantities of goods — one apparently involving grain (barley or similar cereal) and another involving bread rations of some qualified or mixed type — along with smaller counts of two and three units associated with persons or recipients. A delivery or disbursement entry follows, but the details are lost. Much of the text is too damaged or broken to read fully, and the surviving entries amount to partial ledger lines from what was once a more complete account.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (large unit) [...] , [...] 1 (large unit) , barley(?) [...] , [divine/celestial?] bread-ration-vessel | mixed/qualified | 2 (small units) , head/person [...] 3 (small units) , [...] , [delivered/disbursed?] X [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(N14@f) [...] , [...] 1(N14@f) , SZE~a#? [...] , AN |NINDA2x1(N06)| |GAN~dxHI| 2(N01@f) , SAG# [...] 3(N01@f) , [...] , DU7 X [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0285. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P005875) — 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.