Position in chronology
MS 4543
About this tablet
One of the earliest administrative records in human history, this small clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE) was probably produced at Umma in southern Iraq. A scribe used a blunt stylus to impress numerical signs and pictographic logograms into wet clay, recording quantities of fish and the contents of a storage vessel — the kind of everyday inventory keeping that drove the invention of writing itself. The tablet is fragmentary and its reverse is heavily damaged, but even in this broken state it gives us a direct window into the institutional economy of one of the world's first cities. The appearance of what may be an EN-official in the final line hints that the goods being counted belonged to a major temple or palace establishment.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The legible entries read: one large SUHUR-fish; one SUHUR-fish; one [damaged] SUHUR-fish; then 24 units of a SZITA-type vessel or container; 2 measures (sila) placed into the care of a named official; and 1 sila measure from a TA×MAŠ category. The remaining lines are too broken to read, but the very last surviving signs may name an EN-official — a high-ranking lord or temple administrator — alongside a date or reference sign. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 GAL (large) SUHUR-fish 1 SUHUR-fish 1 [...] SUHUR-fish [...]? [...] [...]? 6(?) [...] X [...] 24, SZITA-vessel 2, [given into the] hand/care of ŠA₃ — SILA₃ (measure) 1, [from] |TA×MAŠ| — SILA₃ (measure) [...] [...] X [...] [...] [...] EN (lord/high official)? X UD? X
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) , GAL~a SUHUR@g 2(N01) , SUHUR 3(N01) [...] , SUHUR# [...] [...] , [...] 6(N01)# [...] , X [...] 2(N14) 4(N01) , SZITA@g~b 2(N01) , SZU SZA3~a1 SILA3~a 1(N01) , |TA~dxMASZ| SILA3~a [...] , [...] X [...] , [...] , [...] EN~a#? X U4#? X
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 4543. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006323) — 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.