Position in chronology
MDP 06, 253
About this tablet
This small clay tablet from Susa, in modern Iran, was written in the proto-Elamite script — a writing system contemporary with the earliest Sumerian cuneiform in Uruk-period Mesopotamia (roughly the late 4th millennium BCE) but still largely undeciphered by modern scholars. What survives is a short administrative tally: a series of entries, each pairing an unidentified commodity or category sign with a numeral, followed by a final line that appears to total the count in a larger unit of measure. It is a vivid reminder that some of humanity's very first accounting records remain, quite literally, unread.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a bookkeeping tablet in a script we still cannot read. It lists what look like four separate entries — quantities of five, two, one, and two units of something, each marked with its own combination of unidentified signs — and then closes with a single line recording one unit in a bigger measure, probably a running total of everything above it. The back of the tablet was left blank, or nothing survives on it. Because the proto-Elamite writing system has never been fully deciphered, we can describe the tablet's structure and numbers with confidence, but not say what commodity or transaction it actually records.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(This tablet is written in the undeciphered proto-Elamite script; the great majority of signs have no established phonetic or semantic value. What follows is a structural rendering of the transliteration, not a semantic translation.) Obverse: Line 1: [M327+M342] (compound sign, damaged/uncertain reading; no numeral — likely a heading or classifier) Line 2: [M153+M106~a] M066 M242~b M096 M387~eh M004 M346 , 5(N01) — an entry of five units (N01) Line 3: M249~m M332~d(?) M057~a2 M346 , 2(N01) — an entry of two units (N01) Line 4: M370 M346 , 1(N01) — an entry of one unit (N01) Line 5: [M218~d+M288](?) x M218 M346 , 2(N01) — an entry of two units (N01) Line 6: M346 , 1(N14) — a closing entry of one unit in the larger N14 measure, likely a summary or total Reverse: no signs are preserved or visible; the surface appears blank/uninscribed.
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
|M327+M342|#? , |M153+M106~a|# M066 M242~b M096 M387~eh M004 M346 , 5(N01) M249~m M332~d#? M057~a2# M346 , 2(N01) M370 M346 , 1(N01) |M218~d+M288|#? x M218 M346 , 2(N01) M346 , 1(N14)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 253. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008048) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.