Position in chronology
MDP 17, 110
About this tablet
An accounting tablet in the proto-Elamite script, written at Susa in southwestern Iran around 3000 BCE — one of the world's earliest and still largely undeciphered writing systems. A bookkeeper recorded quantities of goods (the commodity signs cannot yet be read) under a heading, entry by entry, ending with what looks like a total. Tablets like this show that in Elam, as in neighboring Mesopotamia, writing was born to serve administration: counting and tracking goods, not recording speech.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger. Under a heading whose meaning we can no longer read, a clerk listed a series of goods with their amounts: ten units of one commodity plus a partly illegible figure, ten more of the same, then several entries of another commodity counted in smaller measures — one, three, two-and-a-fraction — with a couple of lines too damaged to recover. At the end stands a single large-unit figure, apparently the grand total. The commodities themselves are written in proto-Elamite signs that remain undeciphered, so we know the quantities but not what was being counted; the back of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) (Heading) M157+M153 (rubric/header sign, undeciphered) — M286, M036+1(N30D): 1(N14) [= 10 units] and an uncertain number of a broken numeral; M036+1(N30D): 1(N14) [= 10 units]; M305 M388 M297: 1(N39B) [...]; M297: 3(N39B); M081 (damaged), M036+1(N30D): [quantity lost]; M297: 2(N39B) 1(N24); M388 [...]: [quantity lost]; [... sign(s) lost ...]: [...] 2(N39B) 1(N24) 1(N14); (Total?) 1(N34). (reverse uninscribed)
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
|M157+M153| , M286 |M036+1(N30D)|# , 1(N14) n(n@b) |M036+1(N30D)|# , 1(N14) M305 M388 M297 , 1(N39B) [...] M297 , 3(N39B) M081# |M036+1(N30D)|# , [...] M297 , 2(N39B) 1(N24) M388# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N39B)# 1(N24) 1(N14) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 110. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008308) — 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.