Position in chronology
MDP 06, 270
About this tablet
This small clay tablet from Susa, in what is now southwestern Iran, is written in Proto-Elamite — a numerical and pictographic administrative script used around 3100–2900 BCE that has never been fully deciphered. Like most Proto-Elamite tablets, it records quantities of goods (grain, animals, or other commodities) using numeral notations alongside commodity signs, organized into ruled cases or columns, much like a modern ledger. Because the script itself resists translation and this particular tablet is badly broken, only fragments of sign-and-number pairs survive — enough to show it was once a real bookkeeping record, but not enough to say what was being counted or for whom. It is a tantalizing witness to one of the world's earliest and least-understood writing systems.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a badly broken accounting tablet in the Proto-Elamite script from ancient Susa — a writing system from around 3100–2900 BCE that scholars still cannot read as language. What survives looks like the bones of a ledger: separate entries (cases), each pairing an unidentified commodity sign with a numeral. In one surviving line a quantity of '3' appears next to a number-sign; in another, '1'; in another, '4' followed by '3.' Between these scraps, everything else — the commodities being counted, any totals, and the purpose of the record — has broken away or cannot be identified. What's left tells us only that someone in early Susa was keeping a formal tally of goods, using a notation system that remains one of archaeology's open puzzles.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(The tablet is a Proto-Elamite economic/numerical account, broken into multiple fragments; most lines are lost to breakage. What survives, case by case, reads as follows:) Case 1: [...] , Case 2: [...] (illegible sign) M056~f, M288 , [...] Case 3: [...] , [...] Case 4: [...] M048~c , [...] Case 5: [...] , [...] Case 6: [...] , [...] 3(N39B) [...] Case 7: [...] , [...] Case 8: [...] (illegible sign) , [...] Case 9: [...] M220 M099 , 1(N24) [...] Case 10: [...] , [...] Case 11: [...] , [...] 4(N14) 3(N39B) [...] Case 12: [...] (illegible sign) , [...] (All entries are bounded by breaks; no continuous sentence or total can be recovered.)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] , [...] x M056~f# M288# , [...] [...] , [...] [...] M048~c# , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 3(N39B) [...] [...] , [...] [...] x , [...] [...] M220# M099 , 1(N24) [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 4(N14)# 3(N39B) [...] [...] x , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 270. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008063) — 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.