Position in chronology
MDP 06, 280
About this tablet
This is a small proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (in modern southwest Iran), dating to the Uruk period — the same broad era (late 4th millennium BCE) in which writing itself first emerged in Mesopotamia and its neighboring regions. The surviving text is a bare list of quantities: rows pairing an unread commodity or classifier sign with a numeral written in the proto-Elamite counting system. The signs used here (labeled M096, M066, M097, M218, M371, M033, and various numeral notations like N39B, N24, N30C, N30D) belong to the proto-Elamite script, which remains largely undeciphered by modern scholars, so we can read the tablet's structure — an accounting record — without yet knowing exactly what goods or units it was counting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is an accounting list, badly worn. Each line once recorded an item — identified by a sign or combination of signs whose meaning is now lost — followed by a quantity marked in the ancient number system used at Susa. The first line seems to combine two unidentified signs with a count of one unit of a certain measure; later lines record counts of two, four, and one units in various sub-units, with one line perhaps naming a heading or classifier rather than a counted item. The obverse of the tablet is too eroded to read at all, and even on the more legible reverse, the specific commodities and the officials or parties involved cannot be recovered — only the bookkeeping pattern of quantities entered against unidentified categories remains visible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse — largely effaced/broken) [...] [...] M096, M066(~g?) , 1(N39B) [...] [...] x M097(~h?) , 1(N39B) 2(N30C) 1(N30D) [...] , [...] 2(N39B) 1(N24) 2(N30C) [...] , [...] 2(N39B) 1(N24) [...] , [...] 4(N39B) 1(N24) 1(N30C) [...] , [...] 1(N24) 2(N30C) 1(N30D) [...] M218(?) M371 M033(?) x , 1(N24)
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
[...] , [...] M096 M066~g? , 1(N39B) [...] [...] x M097~h? , 1(N39B) 2(N30C)# 1(N30D)# [...] , [...] 2(N39B) 1(N24) 2(N30C) [...] , [...] 2(N39B) 1(N24) [...] , [...] 4(N39B) 1(N24) 1(N30C) [...] , [...] 1(N24)# 2(N30C)# 1(N30D)# [...] M218?# M371 M033#? x , 1(N24)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 280. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008073) — 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.