Position in chronology
MDP 06, 211
About this tablet
This small clay tablet from Susa (modern Shush, Iran) dates to the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE, making it one of the earliest written documents in human history. It is an administrative or accounting record listing quantities of commodities or categories of goods under several classifier signs, with a numerical total at the end. The signs belong to a proto-cuneiform or proto-Elamite script tradition, and the exact commodities cannot be identified with certainty — the signs are pictographic precursors to later writing that have not all been decoded. Tablets like this one represent the very birth of writing: invented not for literature or law, but to track goods in a complex urban economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tally sheet. Under a heading whose meaning is not yet fully understood, it records several categories of goods with their counts: one category has 4 units, another has 1, another 2, another 1, and another 9. The running total at the bottom comes to one higher-denomination unit (equivalent to 10). The precise nature of the commodities is unclear — the script is so early that not all signs have been deciphered — but the bookkeeping logic is unmistakable.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Heading/rubric: M157] [M157+X]: [M036+1(N14)], 4 (units) [M260+1(N14)]: 1 (unit) [M157+M131] [M370?] x: 2 (units) [M351+1(N14)]: 1 (unit) [M036+1(N14)]: 9 (units) Total: 1 (higher-order unit = 10)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
M157# , |M157+X|# |M036+1(N14)| , 4(N1@b)# |M260+1(N14)| , 1(N01@b)# |M157+M131| M370#? x , 2(N1@b) |M351+1(N14)| , 1(N01@b) |M036+1(N14)| , 9(N1@b) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 211. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008011) — 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.