Position in chronology
MS 4493
About this tablet
One of the oldest accounting documents in human history, dating to the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), probably from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records a tally of livestock — ewes, wethers, she-goats, lambs, and other categories — almost certainly as part of a temple or institutional redistribution system. The signs are proto-cuneiform, the very earliest stage of writing, where numbers and commodity categories are impressed or incised into clay before a fully phonetic script existed. What makes it remarkable is that we are watching bookkeeping and writing being invented simultaneously.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records a livestock account: 25 ewes, 25 male sheep, 20 she-goats, then a damaged entry for an uncertain number of a specific sheep category, followed by an entry for highland lambs, then 5 goats. The final lines appear to record a disbursement or deduction notation, followed by a formulaic closing entry whose precise meaning is still debated by scholars. The last line is blank, probably a summary or total line. The rest of the detail is too damaged or uses signs not yet fully deciphered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine25 ewes (U8) 25 wethers/male sheep (UDUNITA) 20 she-goats (UD5) 2[+x ...] | [large number] × 1 | BAR KIR11 [damaged category of sheep] [...] BAR highland lamb (KUR~a SILA4~c) [...] 5 goats (MASZ2) ZI~a UB [disbursement/subtraction notation] ZATU624~c NU DA~a ZATU752 [blank / total line]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(N14) 5(N01) , U8 2(N14) 5(N01) , UDUNITA~a 2(N14) , UD5~a 2(N01)# [...] , |U4x1(N57)|# BAR# KIR11# [...] , BAR KUR~a SILA4~c [...] 5(N01)# , MASZ2 , ZI~a UB , ZATU624~c NU DA~a ZATU752 ,
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 4493. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006296) — 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.