Position in chronology
MS 4590/2
About this tablet
This is a tiny proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), likely from the city of Umma in southern Iraq. It records quantities of commodities — possibly fish, grain rations, or festival goods — distributed or consumed, in the terse numerical shorthand that characterized the world's earliest bureaucratic writing. Tablets like this are among the very first written documents in human history: not literature or law, but accountancy. The system of large and small round impressions is a metrological notation whose exact commodity and unit values often cannot be recovered without parallel texts.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet opens with five large units of a commodity associated with a sign that may mean 'festival' (its precise meaning at this early date is unknown), linked to a title or category marker. The next entry records an amount under 'SI' as consumed or disbursed. Three further lines list numerical totals — one unit plus one large measure plus a medium measure; three units plus three large measures plus a medium measure; and a final, partially broken line with a very large quantity (sixty?) plus twenty units plus three small units. The rest of the last line is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5(N14) [units of] |EZEM~axX| X PAP~a [X units of] SI GU7 (consumed/disbursed) 1(N01) 1(N39~a) 1(N24) , 3(N01) 3(N39~a) 1(N24) , [X] 1(N45)# 2(N14) [N] 3(N01) , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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-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.