Position in chronology
MDP 06, 251
About this tablet
This is a small proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (ancient Elam, southwestern Iran), dating to the very end of the fourth millennium BCE — roughly contemporary with the late Uruk period in Mesopotamia. It records a short list of commodities or goods, each marked by a sign (still undeciphered — proto-Elamite writing has never been fully read) followed by a numeral notation showing a quantity. Tablets like this are the accounting records of an early bureaucracy: someone kept track of how many units of several different things were held, received, or owed, using a script that predates readable writing and remains one of the great unsolved puzzles of early literacy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a bookkeeping note. It lists several items, one per line, each followed by a number: an entry marked with one sign gets a count of 1, another gets 2, a cluster of several signs together gets roughly 1 (the exact figure is broken), a further entry gets 5, and a final entry is tallied with a mixed count — 4 of one unit, 2 of another, and 1 more of a third, though that last figure is damaged. Because the proto-Elamite signs themselves have never been deciphered, we can recognize that this is a tally of goods or produce and reconstruct the numbers with confidence, but we cannot say in modern terms exactly what was being counted.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) Line 1: M157 — Line 2: M383(~j, damaged) M260(~1, uncertain), — quantity: 1 (unit N01) Line 3: M036 — quantity: 2 (unit N01) Line 4: M111(uncertain) M388 M057 M240 M377(~e) M347 M371 — quantity: <1> (unit N01) Line 5: M036 — quantity: 5 (unit N01) Line 6: M297 — quantity: 4 (unit N39B), 2 (unit N30C), 1 (unit N30D, damaged)
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
M157 , M383~j# M260~1 , 1(N01) M036 , 2(N01) M111#? M388 M057 M240 M377~e M347 M371 , <1(N01)> M036 , 5(N01) M297 , 4(N39B) 2(N30C) 1(N30D)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 251. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008046) — 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.