Position in chronology
MDP 06, 266
About this tablet
This is a fragment of an administrative account tablet in the proto-Elamite writing system, made at Susa in what is now southwestern Iran during the late Uruk period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), one of the world's earliest eras of writing. It records a series of numbered entries — quantities of some commodity or resource, each marked by pictographic signs and numeral notations — but the proto-Elamite script itself remains largely undeciphered by modern scholars, so the specific goods, people, or institutions named cannot yet be read. Tablets like this one are the accounting backbone of one of the earliest complex bureaucracies in human history, even though we cannot yet recover what exactly was being counted.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This clay tablet is an ancient accounting record from Susa, kept using a very early writing system called proto-Elamite that scholars still cannot fully read. What survives looks like a series of line entries, each ending in a number — 4 of something, then 6 of something, then 1, then 4 again, then 2 of a larger unit — separated by unreadable pictographic signs that probably named goods, people, or institutional categories. Much of the tablet is broken away, so entire entries are missing at the start and end of most lines. In short: it's a numbered inventory or ledger whose individual line items we cannot yet translate, only the quantities and the bare skeleton of its structure.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(This is a proto-Elamite administrative tablet; most signs are undeciphered pictographic/numerical notations rather than a readable language, so the 'translation' below preserves the sign-sequence and quantities as recorded, following the entry breaks marked by commas in the source.) [broken] , [broken] 4(N01) Sign M374 (variant c) [broken] , [broken] [broken] , [broken] 6(N01) Sign M281 (variant f), sign M149 (variant a1), sign M387 [broken] , [broken] [broken], sign M075 (variant m, queried), sign M149 (variant a1), (illegible sign) [broken] , [broken] [broken] , 1(N01) (illegible sign) [broken] , [broken] [broken] , [broken] 4(N01) Sign M057 [broken] , [broken] Sign M387 , 2(N14) Sign M136 (queried) [broken] , [broken]
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
[...] , [...] 4(N01)# M374~c# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 6(N01)# M281~f M149~a1# M387# [...] , [...] [...] M075~m#? M149~a1# x [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) x [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 4(N01)# M057# [...] , [...] M387# , 2(N14) M136#? [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 266. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008059) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.