Position in chronology
MDP 06, 273
About this tablet
This is a small proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa, dating to the late 4th millennium BCE — one of the earliest writing systems known, used alongside (and partly contemporary with) early Sumerian cuneiform in nearby Mesopotamia. The surviving fragments show rows of numerical notations (impressed circles and wedges recording quantities) beside a few pictographic commodity or classifier signs, but the script itself remains largely undeciphered, so we cannot say what was actually being counted — grain, animals, or labor are all plausible for this genre. The tablet is badly broken into several pieces, and most of each line is lost, leaving only fragments of an accounting record.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a broken accounting tablet, written in the still largely undeciphered proto-Elamite script of ancient Susa. Each line once recorded an entry — apparently a commodity or category marked by a sign, followed by a quantity — but only scattered numbers remain legible: a count of '5' in one unit, then '4' in another, later '5' and '5' together, and toward the end '2' and '2' in yet different units. The commodity signs themselves, including one marked as damaged or uncertain by the ancient scribe's own hand or by later breakage, cannot be translated into English because their meaning has not been recovered by modern scholarship. In short, this is a fragment of a tally or inventory whose numbers we can read but whose subject matter remains unknown.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Column/line 1) [...], (Line 2) [...], [...] 5(N14) [...] (Line 3) [...], [...] (Line 4) [...] |M305+M111~c|(damaged/uncertain sign), [...] (Line 5) [...], (Line 6) [...], [...] 5(N14)(damaged) 4(N01) (Line 7) [...], [...] (Line 8) [...], [...] 5(N14) 5(N01) (Line 9) x [...], [...] (Line 10) [...], [...] (Line 11) [...], [...] 2(N34) 2(N45) [...]
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
[...] , [...] , [...] 5(N14) [...] [...] , [...] [...] |M305+M111~c|#? , [...] [...] , [...] , [...] 5(N14)# 4(N01) [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 5(N14) 5(N01) x [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N34) 2(N45) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 273. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008066) — 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.