Position in chronology
MS 4483
About this tablet
This is a very early administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3100 BCE), among the oldest writing in the world, from the region of Umma in southern Iraq. It is not a sentence in the modern sense but a series of bookkeeping entries — numbers paired with pictographic signs for commodities such as bread, fish, sheep, and measured quantities of goods — the kind of tally an official kept to track disbursements from a temple or storehouse. Because the script is proto-cuneiform, many of the individual signs (their exact commodity meaning, not just their shape) remain genuinely debated among specialists; this tablet is a snapshot of accounting practice at the very dawn of literacy, before writing recorded language directly.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This looks like an inventory or ration list: a series of short lines, each giving a small number followed by a symbol for some good — a bread or ration allotment, a quantity linked to a day-sign, five units of something involving fish and a measured amount, one unit of a sheep or donkey, another unit of fish with a measure, and a couple of further entries whose commodity signs are too worn or too ambiguous to name with confidence. The tablet closes with a short notation that seems to mean something like 'issued' or 'allotted for the year,' and the remaining lines are blank or lost. The back of the tablet shows no legible writing — either it was left blank or the surface is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse, case by case, each entry: quantity — commodity/sign) 1. 3(N01) units — U4 (day/sun-sign), GAR (bread/ration-sign) 2. 1(N14), 4(N57) units — GAR (bread/ration-sign) 3. 5(N01) units — NE (fire/fuel-sign, broken) + KU6 (fish-sign) + SILA3 (capacity-measure sign) 4. 1(N01) unit — ANŠE(?) (donkey/load-sign, broken) / UDU (sheep-sign, broken) 5. 1(N01) unit — UR2 (base/lap-sign) + SILA3 (capacity-measure sign) 6. 5(N01) units — KU6 (fish-sign) + SILA3 (capacity-measure sign) 7. 1(N01) unit — DU8 (compound sign, broken) 8. 2(N01) units — ŠA×ḪI (compound sign, uncertain reading) 9. MU BA — "year/name: disbursed/allotted" 10. (blank/uninscribed line) 11. (blank/uninscribed line) (Reverse: uninscribed or too eroded to read; no additional signs discernible.)
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
3(N01) , U4 GAR 1(N14) , 4(N57) GAR 5(N01) , NE~a#? KU6~a SILA3~a 1(N01) , ANSZE~b? UDU~a#? 1(N01) , UR2 SILA3~a 5(N01) , KU6~a SILA3~a 1(N01) , DU8@g~c#? 2(N01) , |(SZAxHI@g~a)~a|? , MU BA , ,
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 4483. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006286) — 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.