Position in chronology
MS 4571
About this tablet
This small clay tablet comes from the very dawn of writing — the Uruk period, roughly 3200 BCE, when Sumerian scribes in southern Mesopotamia first began pressing reed styli into wet clay to keep track of goods. What survives here is a livestock tally: rows recording ewes, rams, nanny goats, billy goats, and lambs, each counted with impressed circular and wedge-shaped numeral marks, some animals distinguished as 'foreign' or 'highland' stock. It is an accountant's memo rather than a story — proof that some of humanity's earliest writing was invented to count sheep.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tally sheet of sheep and goats. The surviving entries read, in order: some number of ewes; 57 rams; an unclear quantity followed by a broken entry; a large count of nanny goats; about 6 billy goats; a note pairing 'sheep' with what may be a storehouse; roughly 37 ewes of the kir11 type; about 5 lambs described as coming from a foreign or highland area; 31 female goats; 2 goats of foreign/highland stock; 3 lambs with an illegible qualifier; and a final line mentioning the sign AN whose meaning here is unclear. The tablet breaks off before any total or closing note, and its back is too worn to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [...] 1(N14) [...], ewe (U8) 5(N14) 7(N01), ram (UDUNITA) [...] 1(N14) 4(N01), [X — sign broken/illegible] 1(N34) [...] 6(N01), nanny goat (UD5) [...] 6(N01)(?), billy goat (MAŠNITA) (blank case), sheep (UDU), storehouse/E2(?) [...] [...] 3(N14) 7(N01)(?), KIR11 (ewe) 5(N14)(?), foreign-land lamb (KUR SILA4) 3(N14) 1(N01), female goat (SAL MAŠ) 2(N14), foreign-land goat (KUR MAŠ) 3(N01), lamb (SILA4)(?) [X] (blank case), AN [X] [...] (blank case) — traces only, remainder illegible/uninscribed
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
[...] 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-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.