Position in chronology
MDP 06, 291
About this tablet
This is a fragmentary administrative tablet in the proto-Elamite script, made at Susa (in what is now southwestern Iran) in the late fourth millennium BCE — one of the world's earliest writing systems, and one that remains undeciphered to this day. Its layout is unmistakably a bookkeeping record: a repeated series of sign-clusters, each closed off by a quantity written in the N39B numerical notation, almost certainly listing amounts of some commodity — grain, animals, or labor allocations — assigned to different accounts or recipients. Because proto-Elamite signs cannot yet be read as words, no one can say today what was actually being counted; scholars can only describe the structure of the accounts, not their content. The tablet itself survives only as several broken, worn fragments, reassembled and photographed together under museum number Sb 15134.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a piece of ancient bookkeeping from Susa, written in a script no one can yet read. What survives looks like a series of line-item entries — each one a short cluster of signs (probably naming a commodity, person, or place) followed by a quantity, marked '1' in the local counting system. Some lines are complete enough to see both the sign-group and its number; others are broken off entirely, leaving only a numeral or nothing at all. In short: it's clearly a tally or account of some kind, repeating a similar entry format line after line, but exactly what was being counted — and for whom — is lost to us because the proto-Elamite writing system has never been deciphered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineThis tablet is inscribed in the undeciphered proto-Elamite script; the signs below are conventional sign-list labels (M-numbers), not decipherable words, and each numeral is a proto-Elamite capacity/count notation (N39B). 1. [...] [sign M218] [sign M297(damaged)] — 1 (N39B) 2. [sign M347(damaged)?] [...] — [...] 3. [...] [sign M230 var. a] [sign M377 var. g(damaged)] [sign M218] [sign M223 var. a] — 1 (N39B) 4. [sign M270 var. m] [sign M371 var. a(damaged)?] [...] — [...] 5. [...] — 1 (N39B) 6. [...] [sign M217] [sign M361 var. d] [sign M329] [sign M223 var. a] — 1 (N39B) [...] 7. [...] — 1 (N39B)(damaged) 8. [sign M066(damaged)] [sign M352 var. o] [sign M096(damaged)] [sign M297] — 1 (N39B) 9. [sign M217(damaged)?] [...] — [...] 10. [sign M066(damaged)] [sign M297] — 1 (N39B) 11. [sign M217 var. e] [sign M024] [sign M223 var. a] [sign M066] [sign M288] — [...] 12. [...] [sign M296(damaged)] — 1 (N39B) 13. [sign M024] [sign M281 var. d] [sign M096(damaged)] — 1 (N39B)
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
[...] M218 M297# , 1(N39B) M347#? [...] , [...] [...] M230~a M377~g# M218 M223~a , 1(N39B) M270~m M371~a#? [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N39B) [...] M217 M361~d M329 M223~a , 1(N39B) [...] [...] , 1(N39B)# M066# M352~o M096# M297 , 1(N39B) M217#? [...] , [...] M066# M297 , 1(N39B) M217~e M024 M223~a M066 M288 , [...] [...] M296# , 1(N39B) M024 M281~d M096# , 1(N39B)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 291. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008083) — 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.