Position in chronology
MS 4463
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), possibly from the site of Umma in southern Iraq. It records numerical entries alongside commodity and enclosure signs — the kind of terse bookkeeping used by the earliest literate administrators in history to track wool, livestock products, or similar goods moving through an institutional storage system. The tablet is a fragment: most lines are broken, and only scattered numerals and a few sign clusters survive. Even in its damaged state, it is a witness to the very invention of writing, when Mesopotamian officials first began turning clay into permanent records.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads roughly as: '2 units of [fine wool / processed goods]' in the first entry, followed by a partially legible sign for some kind of enclosure or animal pen. The remaining lines record scattered numbers — a larger unit and several single units — but the commodities and names they belong to are almost entirely lost. The back of the tablet is blank. The rest is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 units — wool/fine goods [processing term RAD~a] [...] — [...] [enclosure/cowshed sign with internal element]#? [...] — [...] 2 units#? [...] — [...] [...] — [...] [...] 1 large unit#? [...] 1 unit#? — [...] [...] 1 unit#? — [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(N01) , SIG RAD~a [...] , [...] |AB~bxSZA3~a1|#? [...] , [...] 2(N01)# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] 1(N14)# [...] 1(N01)# , [...] [...] 1(N01)# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 4463. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006284) — 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.