Position in chronology
MDP 06, 268
About this tablet
This is a small fragment of an administrative tablet from Susa, written in the proto-Elamite script that flourished alongside early Uruk-period cuneiform around the late 4th millennium BCE. It records a tally of goods or commodities against a series of sign-groups — likely commodity classifiers or institutional markers — each followed by numerals in different counting systems. Most of the individual signs remain undeciphered by modern scholarship, so while we can see this is an accounting record, exactly what was being counted and for whom is still unknown.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary account listing quantities of some commodity. Each line pairs a sign or short group of signs — probably naming a category, a person, or an institution — with a number. The first line records '3' of something; the next gives '1' against a marker called M346, which seems to reappear as a kind of subheading every other line. Further down the numbers grow larger — '1 large unit plus 4' in one line, '2' in another, '4' in another, and '1 large unit plus 1' further on — but the words identifying what is being counted are written in signs that have not yet been deciphered. The tablet breaks off before a final total, and much of the surrounding text is lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], [...] 3(N01) M346, 1(N01) x x [...], [...] [...] M111#? M240~b M057~a, 1(N14) 4(N01) M346, 2(N01) [...] [...] M250~ba# M387 x, 4(N01) [...] [...] x M096, 1(N14) 1(N01) [...] [...] M250~ba M387 M218 [...], [...] [...] M240 M057~a, 3(N01) [...]
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
[...] , [...] 3(N01)# M346 , 1(N01) x x [...] , [...] [...] M111#? M240~b M057~a , 1(N14) 4(N01) M346 , 2(N01) [...] [...] M250~ba# M387 x , 4(N01) [...] [...] x M096 , 1(N14) 1(N01) [...] [...] M250~ba M387 M218 [...] , [...] [...] M240 M057~a , 3(N01) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 268. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008061) — 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.