Position in chronology
MS 4461
About this tablet
A very small, heavily damaged administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), possibly from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It appears to record quantities of commodities — linen cloth, wool, and perhaps birds or bird-related goods — in the proto-cuneiform system that preceded true writing. Tablets like this are among the earliest written documents in human history: not literature or myth, but the practical bookkeeping of a large temple or palace economy. The signs are impressed and incised in the archaic style characteristic of the very dawn of literacy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The readable entries list: 1 unit of linen cloth; 1 unit of wool (the preceding sign is unclear); further quantities of wool in broken lines; and somewhere in the text, a record involving birds alongside two signs — one a known proto-cuneiform form (ZATU659) and one a compound sign — whose exact meaning cannot be recovered. The rest 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[...] 1 unit, linen cloth 1 unit, [X] wool [...], [...] wool [...], [...] [...], [...] X bird ZATU659 A |ŠITA׊U2| [...], [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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.