Position in chronology
MS 4572
About this tablet
This is a very early administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the late fourth millennium BCE), one of the world's oldest written documents, likely from the Umma region of southern Iraq. It appears to be a tally or list — using proto-cuneiform pictographs for officials, a potter, and livestock — recording some kind of allocation or accounting among named categories of people or goods, but the surface damage means the exact transaction cannot be reconstructed. Tablets like this are the very foundation of writing itself: administrators tracking grain, animals, and labor before writing had even developed full grammar.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a badly worn accounting tablet, the kind used by early bureaucrats around 3100 BCE to track goods and people. It lists a series of entries, each apparently counted as '1': something involving a 'foot' or transport notation, an entry for a lord or official tied to an 'interior' or 'contents' with a qualifying mark, an entry for a potter, and another partly damaged transport-type entry. After a break in the tablet, the surviving text picks up again with a mention of a sheep or small livestock, also damaged. The overall picture is of a short list-format record — but too eroded to say exactly what was being counted, delivered, or allotted, or to whom.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [...] ...(illegible) SAG(?) ... [...] 2. 1 GIR3(?) [foot/transport sign — damaged] 3. 1 EN [lord/official], ŠA3 [interior/contents], HI [qualifier — 'mixed'?] 4. 1 BAHAR2 [potter/vessel-maker] 5. 1 GIR3(?) DIM(?) ... [signs damaged] 6. ... [illegible sign] 7. (blank / broken) (Break) 8. [...] ... UDU~a(?) [sheep/small livestock — damaged]
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
, [...] 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-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.