Position in chronology
MS 4461
About this tablet
This is a small, badly worn administrative tablet fragment from the Uruk period, likely from Umma, recording deliveries or allocations of commodities — linen and wool are named explicitly, and a bird sign appears alongside several still-undeciphered proto-cuneiform signs. Tablets like this belong to the earliest layer of writing in human history, roughly 3200 BCE, when scribes were inventing a system to track goods (textiles, animals, rations) for temple or palace households rather than to record language as speech. Because so many of the signs (ZATU659, ŠITA variants) have never been matched to later cuneiform readings, much of the tablet's precise accounting logic remains genuinely unrecoverable.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken tablet lists quantities of goods received or issued: one unit of linen cloth, one unit of an unspecified wool grade, and another wool entry whose details are lost. A further line mentions a bird together with two obscure signs and what may be a vessel or container notation, but the surrounding text has broken away on every side, so we cannot reconstruct the full transaction — who supplied what to whom, or the total sums involved. The tablet is simply too fragmentary to say more than that it recorded an inventory of textiles and possibly poultry.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], 1(N01) unit, linen (GADA) 1(N01) unit, [...] wool (SIG2) [...], [...] wool (SIG2) [...], [...] [...], [...] ... bird (MUŠEN), ZATU659, water/A, ŠITA-vessel/ŠU2 [...], [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[...] 1(N01)# , GADA~a@g 1(N01)# , X SIG2~b# [...] , [...] SIG2~b# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] X MUSZEN ZATU659 A |SZITA~a1xSZU2| [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 4461. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006282) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.