MS 4571

~3100 BCE·Uruk Period·P006340

About this tablet

This is one of the oldest written documents in human history — a proto-cuneiform livestock accounting tablet from the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE, very likely from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. A temple or palace administrator used it to record numbers of sheep and goats, distinguishing animals by sex, age, and possibly breed or origin ('mountain' animals). Such tablets are the very beginning of writing: numbers and commodity signs pressed into clay to keep track of institutional herds. The fact that writing was invented for bookkeeping — not poetry or religion — is vividly illustrated by objects like this one.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

This tablet records a count of livestock held by an institution. Reading across the surviving entries: roughly 17 ewes; 57 male sheep; 14 animals of an unclear type; a large number — possibly in the hundreds — of she-goats; 6 nanny-goats; sheep associated with a house or stall; 37 young suckling animals; 50 mountain-breed lambs; 31 female sheep and kids; 20 mountain-breed kids; 3 lambs plus an unreadable entry; and a final line too broken to recover. The rest is lost.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

[...] 1(N14)[+?], [...] ewes 5(N14) 7(N01), male sheep (wether/ram) [...] 1(N14) 4(N01), [broken sign] 1(N34) [...] 6(N01), she-goats [...] 6(N01)[?], female goat (nanny-goat) , sheep — house/stall [...] [...] 3(N14) 7(N01)[?], KIR11 [young animal / suckling?] 5(N14)[?], mountain [breed] — lamb 3(N14) 1(N01), female sheep — goat-kid 2(N14), mountain [breed] — goat-kid 3(N01)[?], lamb [broken sign] , AN [broken sign] [...] [blank / end of account]

Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.

Transliteration

[...] 1(N14)# , [...] U8
5(N14)# 7(N01)# , UDUNITA~a
[...] 1(N14)# 4(N01)# , X
1(N34) [...] 6(N01)# , UD5~a# [...]
6(N01)#? , MASZNITA#
, UDU~a# E2~b#? [...]
[...] 3(N14)# 7(N01)#? , KIR11
5(N14)#? , KUR~a SILA4~c
3(N14)# 1(N01)# , SAL MASZ
2(N14) , KUR~a# MASZ#
3(N01)# , SILA4~c#? X
, AN X [...]
,

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 4571. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).

Attribution

Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006340) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).

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