Position in chronology
MS 4572
About this tablet
This is one of the earliest writing experiments in human history — a small administrative tablet from the late Uruk period (roughly 3200–3000 BCE), probably from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records a short list of people or commodities, including what appears to be a high-status official (EN), a potter or ceramic craftsman, and possibly sheep, each marked with a numerical notation. Tablets like this are among the very first documents ever written: not literature, not law, but the mundane bookkeeping that drove early urban economies. The signs are still highly pictographic, and many remain only partially deciphered — the meaning of several entries here is genuinely uncertain even to specialists.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records a short list, most of it damaged. What survives shows individual entries, each preceded by the number one: one delivery (or transport) entry; one high official (or lord) connected with an internal or combined allocation; one potter; one transported or fashioned item (too damaged to read clearly). A possible entry for sheep appears at the bottom, but the surrounding text is broken away. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] X SAG(?) X [...] 1 GIR3~c (delivery/transport notation?) 1 EN (high official/lord) — internal (ŠA3) — mixed/combined (HI) 1 BAHAR2~b (potter/ceramic specialist) 1 GIR3~c(?) DIM~a(?) X (transported/fashioned [commodity] — damaged) X (sign unclear) [blank line / total line?] [...] X UDU (sheep?) [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
, [...] X SAG#? X [...] , I GIR3~c#? , I EN~a SZA3~a1 HI , I BAHAR2~b , I GIR3~c#? DIM~a#? X , X , [...] , [...] X UDU~a#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 4572. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P006341) — 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.