Position in chronology
MS 4590/2
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the Uruk period (roughly the later 4th millennium BCE), one of the earliest phases of writing anywhere in the world. It is not a sentence in the modern sense but a proto-cuneiform accounting notation — rows of numeral impressions (made with a round stylus) alongside a few pictographic signs that seem to record quantities of some commodity (possibly grain, horn-related goods, or rations) being counted, totaled, and 'consumed' or issued. Tablets like this come from the earliest bureaucratic administration of Mesopotamian cities such as Uruk or Umma, where officials tracked goods long before writing could express full spoken language.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an ancient tally sheet. It records a quantity of five units of something tied to a sign that may mean 'festival,' followed by a mark that looks like a supervisor's or total notation. Below that, another entry mentions a commodity — possibly horn, or something measured similarly — that was 'consumed' or handed out. The rest of the tablet is a series of number groups (one, one, one; then three, three, one; then one, two, and three of various units) recorded in the archaic proto-cuneiform numeral system, but the commodities or people they refer to, and the very end of the text, are lost to breaks in the clay.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) Line 1: 5 (units of measure N14), the sign-group |EZEM~axX| (festival-compound sign), [broken sign], PAP~a (totaling/supervisory mark) Line 2: [break], SI (horn/commodity sign), GU7 (consumed / disbursed) Line 3: 1 (N01), 1 (N39~a), 1 (N24), [break] Line 4: 3 (N01), 3 (N39~a), 1 (N24), [break], [illegible sign] Line 5: 1 (N45), 2 (N14), [broken numeral], 3 (N01), [break], [...] (Reverse and edges: uninscribed or bear only numerical/seal impressions — no further legible sign groups preserved.)
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
5(N14) , |EZEM~axX| X PAP~a , SI# GU7# 1(N01) 1(N39~a) 1(N24) , 3(N01) 3(N39~a) 1(N24) , X 1(N45)# 2(N14) [N] 3(N01) , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MS 4590/2. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P274476) — 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.