Position in chronology
UET 2, 0287
About this tablet
A small, heavily worn lenticular clay tablet from the ancient city of Ur, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2900–2350 BCE). The surviving signs suggest an archaic administrative or accounting record — possibly a list of commodities, institutional roles, or allocations involving grain, date palms, and a high-status title or official (EN). Such tablets are among the earliest bureaucratic documents in human history, tracking goods and responsibilities within a temple or palace economy. The text is too damaged to reconstruct a continuous reading, but the vocabulary is consistent with the institutional management of food stores.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives here is fragmentary. One section appears to reference barley, a stone (or personnel marker), and what may be a receipt or disbursement into storage. Another line mentions a 'mother' figure or senior female role, a high-status title (possibly NUN, 'prince' or a storehouse), a cattle-stall or institutional category, and date palms. The final legible word is EN — a lord, high priest, or institutional head. Much of the tablet is too damaged or broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] TA NAM ŠÀ [...] [...] ŠE NA |ŠU₂.2(N57)| ŠÀ [...] SI AMA NUN? AB GIŠIMMAR [...] [...] EN
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] TA~f NAM~c SZA3~a1 [...] , [...] SZE~a# NA~a |SZU2.2(N57)| SZA3~a1 [...] , SI AMA~b NUN~a? AB~a GISZIMMAR~b1# [...] , [...] EN~a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0287. 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 (P005877) — 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.