Position in chronology
MDP 06, 207
About this tablet
A highly fragmentary proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Susa (ancient Elam, modern southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE, making it among the earliest written records in human history. The tablet records quantities of commodities or goods against what appear to be commodity signs, using the numerical notation system characteristic of these very early accounting documents. Like most proto-cuneiform tablets from Susa, it is an administrative tally: someone was counting things and recording them for institutional purposes. The signs are too damaged and the commodity categories too ambiguous to reconstruct the precise nature of the goods, but the format — sign followed by number — is the standard template of early Elamite proto-writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives records a series of entries, each pairing one or more commodity signs with a number: one large unit and one small unit of something; a sign for a commodity followed by 2; another category with 4; 3 of something else; 5 of yet another item. Several entries are too broken to read. The tablet is essentially a ledger fragment — a tally of different goods or categories, each counted and noted down. The rest is lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , 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 , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.