Position in chronology
UET 2, 0344
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, one of the oldest cities in ancient Iraq, dating to roughly 2900–2500 BCE. It appears to be a list of commodities or personnel categories — entries include references to a blade or dagger, a bird (likely poultry rations), vine or wine, and possibly a great dragon or serpent (USZUMGAL, which may be a title or divine epithet). The tablet is too fragmentary and worn to reconstruct a complete transaction, but it fits the pattern of the earliest Sumerian record-keeping: brief, terse notations linking quantities or categories of goods to institutional or personnel headings. Its survival in multiple pieces, now held in Philadelphia, gives a sense of just how fragile the earliest written records are.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too damaged to read in full, but what survives is a short administrative list. One entry mentions a blade or dagger alongside a sign combination that may indicate a container or category. Another line records something under the heading 'NU AZU' — possibly a medical or priestly title. A further entry invokes 'USZUMGAL A,' likely a great serpent or a title connected to it. Two final entries note vine or wine, and birds. The beginning of each line is broken away, so quantities and full identifications are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] X [...] [...] GIR2~a (dagger/blade) | URI3~a+IB~a | [...] [...] NU AZU? [...] USZUMGAL A [...] [...] GESZTIN~c (vine/wine) [...] [...] MUSZEN (bird)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] X [...] , [...] GIR2~a# |URI3~a+IB~a|# [...] , [...] NU AZU? [...] , USZUMGAL A [...] , [...] GESZTIN~c [...] , [...] MUSZEN
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — UET 2, 0344. 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 (P005931) — 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.