Position in chronology
MDP 17, 046
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in proto-Elamite — a script that has never been deciphered. A bookkeeper recorded three entries of some commodity or category of goods (or perhaps workers or animals), each headed by signs whose meanings are lost, followed by clearly readable numbers punched into the clay. Tablets like this are among humanity's earliest written records, and their numbers can be read even though the words cannot.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger with three line items. The heading at the top is damaged and can't be made out. The first entry lists a string of category signs we can no longer read, credited with a large quantity — two of the biggest counting units plus five tens. The second entry, under a different pair of signs, records one ten and five single units — fifteen in all. The third entry, under yet another sign, records three tens — thirty. The back of the tablet is blank except for modern museum ink. In short: three batches of something, carefully counted, for an administration whose vocabulary is lost to us.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Header) [M327+M342?] (sign broken, reading queried) , M054 M377+M383+M377 M054 M388 M066 M314 M128 M096 — 2(N45) 5(N14) M009 M321~fa — 1(N14) 5(N01) M346 — 3(N14) (The non-numerical signs are proto-Elamite and remain undeciphered; only the numerical notation can be read with confidence: entry one records 2 large N45-units and 5 N14-units; entry two, 1 N14-unit and 5 N01-units; entry three, 3 N14-units.)
Our translation engine — Fable 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
|M327+M342|#? , M054 |M377+M383+M377| M054 M388 M066 M314 M128# M096 , 2(N45) 5(N14) M009 M321~fa# , 1(N14) 5(N01) M346 , 3(N14)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 046. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008244) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.