Position in chronology
MDP 17, 092
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3000 BCE in proto-Elamite — a script that has never been deciphered. The numbers can be read with confidence, but the signs naming the goods or people being counted remain unknown. It opens with a heading sign and then lists a handful of entries, each pairing one or more commodity signs with a quantity, including fractional amounts. Tablets like this show a fully functioning bureaucracy at Susa keeping ledgers in a writing system whose words are still lost to us.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short ledger. Under a heading whose meaning we can no longer read, a clerk recorded five entries: one item counted at 3 units; another at 1 unit; a third at 2 units plus 4 smaller fractional measures; a fourth at 1 unit plus 1 fraction; and a final, damaged entry preserving only 1 fraction and 1 smaller fraction. What exactly was being counted — grain, animals, workers, rations — is unknown, because the commodity signs of the proto-Elamite script have never been deciphered. Only the arithmetic survives. The back of the tablet is blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Header) M327+M342 (undeciphered classifier/heading sign): M180 M387 M381 M263-b1 — 3 (N1 units) M261-d — 1 (N1 unit) M387-a M328-b [...] — 2 (N1 units) 4 (N39B fractional units) M144 M243-j — 1 (N1 unit) 1 (N39B fractional unit) [...] — [...] 1 (N39B fractional unit) 1 (N24 fractional unit) (damaged) (Reverse uninscribed.)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
|M327+M342| , M180~b M387 M381 M263~b1 , 3(N01) M261~d , 1(N01) M387~a M328~b [...] , 2(N01) 4(N39B) M144 M243~j , 1(N01) 1(N39B) [...] , [...] 1(N39B)# 1(N24)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 092. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008290) — 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.