Position in chronology
MDP 06, 225
About this tablet
This is one of the earliest administrative tablets in human history — a proto-Elamite or late Uruk-period accounting record from Susa (in modern Iran), dated to roughly 3100–2900 BCE. It lists quantities of commodities or animals under a heading sign, with numerical notations beside each entry. The tablet is too early for any language we can fully read: the signs are pictographic precursors to later cuneiform, and most cannot yet be given phonetic values. Tablets like this are the birth certificate of record-keeping itself — bureaucrats tracking goods before writing had a voice.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet opens with a heading or document-type marker. The entries that follow record specific commodities or categories — probably animals, vessels, or institutional goods — with their quantities: one entry lists 2 units, another lists 1, another lists 1, and so on. Several lines are damaged or missing. The reverse face of the tablet is largely blank or too eroded to read. In total, this appears to be a short administrative tally of a handful of items, each counted in small numbers.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineM157 [heading/rubric] M066~a × M346(?), 2 |M351+M346| M066~a M346, 1 M305 M388 ×, [...] [...], 1 M302~t(?) M346, 1 [...], [...] 1
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
M157# , M066~a x M346#? , 2(N01)# |M351+1(N14)| M066~a M346 , 1(N01) M305 M388 x , [...] [...] , 1(N01) M302~t? M346 , 1(N01) [...] , [...] 1(N01)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 225. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008024) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.