Position in chronology
MDP 06, 207
About this tablet
This is a small proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa, dating to the Uruk period (late 4th millennium BCE), one of thousands of similar economic records produced in the earliest phase of writing in this region. It records a series of entries pairing an undeciphered commodity or category sign with a numerical quantity — the kind of bookkeeping a scribe or storehouse official used to track goods, rations, or livestock. Proto-Elamite script remains largely undeciphered, so while we can reliably read the numeral signs (N01, N14) and see the tablet's structure of paired entries, the meaning of most of the word-signs (what commodity, what institution, whose name) is still unknown to scholars. The tablet is broken and worn, missing its edges and parts of several lines, which is typical for this fragile, unbaked class of clay administrative documents.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tally sheet: a list of short entries, each giving an unidentified item or category followed by a number. The first entry records a quantity of 1 large unit and 1 small unit; the next several lines pair a recurring marker sign (labeled M346 here) with counts of 2, 1, and other amounts; other lines combine several different signs together with counts of 3, 4, or 5 units. Several lines are broken or too worn to read fully, and the last couple of lines are almost entirely lost except for a stray number or a heading-like pair of signs. In short, it looks like an inventory or accounting record — but because the proto-Elamite writing system used here has never been fully deciphered, we can count what was recorded far more confidently than we can say what was actually being counted.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Column/line 1) [...], 1(N14) 1(N01) (2) M346 , 2(N01) (3) x M371 , 4(N01)#? (4) M346 , [...] (5) [...] M124#? M246~ca# M386~a# M066# , 3(N01) (6) M263~1 M387~ee# M066~a , 5(N01) (7) x x , 3(N01)# (8) M346 , 1(N01) [...] (9) [...] , 2(N14) [...] (10) M005~a? M348 , [...]
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) 1(N01) M346 , 2(N01) x M371 , 4(N01)#? M346 , [...] [...] M124#? M246~ca# M386~a# M066# , 3(N01) M263~1 M387~ee# M066~a , 5(N01) x x , 3(N01)# M346 , 1(N01) [...] [...] , 2(N14) [...] M005~a? M348 , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 207. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008007) — 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.