Position in chronology
MDP 17, 092
About this tablet
This is a proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3200–2900 BCE — among the very earliest written records in human history. It records quantities of commodities or categories of goods under various sign-groups that remain undeciphered: proto-Elamite writing has never been fully decoded, so we can read the numbers but not the words. The tablet is fragmented and partially worn, with entries pairing sign-groups (probably commodity or category labels) with numerical notations using the N01, N39B, and N24 numeral signs. It is a piece of ancient bureaucratic accounting, the kind of everyday record-keeping that drove the invention of writing itself.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening line appears to be a heading or section marker. The following entries list several categories of goods or entities — their exact nature is unknown because proto-Elamite script remains undeciphered — each paired with a count: one group records 3 units, another 1 unit, another 2 units and 4 larger units, another 1 unit and 1 larger unit, and a final broken line records at least 1 larger unit and 1 unit of a still different denomination. The rest is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Heading/section marker: M327+M342] M180 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)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.