Position in chronology
MDP 17, 153
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in south-western Iran, written a little over 5,000 years ago in proto-Elamite — a script that is still largely undeciphered. The numbers are perfectly clear even though the words are not: six short entries, each debited two units, followed by a grand total written with the larger 'ten' sign. Each line names a different recipient, commodity, or department using sign-groups whose sound and meaning nobody today can read, so what we have is an intelligible ledger with an unintelligible vocabulary — one of the oldest surviving pieces of bureaucratic bookkeeping from the Iranian plateau.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A short ledger, six lines long. Each line lists a different heading — a person, a commodity, or a section of the household — and assigns it two units. At the bottom the scribe drew the summary line and wrote the total using the larger 'ten' counter: two of those, i.e. twenty units. The words themselves are lost to us, since the script has never been deciphered, and the back of the tablet is blank except for one big impressed sign and a pair of small round number marks. Whatever the goods were, someone in Susa was keeping careful count of them.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse, heading) M327(?) — (Entries) M388 |M106~2+M288| M386(?) M124 M218 M386(?) M240~e M096 M288~i(?) — 2 (N01) M124 M217 M259 M218 M288~i — 2 (N01) M124 M352~n M254~a M096 M288~i — 2 (N01) M219 M387~c M066 M288~i — 2 (N01) M124 M096(?) M227 M066(?) M288~i — 2 (N01) M124 M372 |M218+M099| M371 |M131+M388| [ … ] M218 M288~i — 2 (N01) (Total) M288~i — 2 (N14) [i.e. 2 units of the tens-sign] (Reverse) Uninscribed apart from a single large impressed sign in the middle of the surface and two small round numerical impressions near the upper left; no readable line of text. (Edges) Uninscribed in antiquity; the modern museum numbers "Sb 15439" and "MDP 17 / 153" are inked on the top and right edges.
Our translation engine — Opus 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.
Engine notes
read from photo6 uncertain terms ↓
- M288~i — Repeated qualifier or commodity sign; its precise semantic value (a type of goods, a person-category, a qualifier such as 'ration' or 'allocation') is not established. The '~i' variant notation indicates a specific sub-form whose distinction from the base sign is not yet semantically resolved.
- M218 — Functions as a subtotal or section-divider in parallel texts; may also carry commodity meaning. Cannot be translated as a word.
- N14 — Conventionally 10× N01 in sexagesimal counting, giving a total of 20 units, but the commodity-specific numerical system here could assign a different value; the actual magnitude is uncertain.
- M327? — Opening sign on obverse, read with a query in the transliteration; too damaged in the photo to confirm. May be a heading, institutional name, or date formula.
- |M106~2+M288|, |M218+M099|, |M131+M388| — Compound (ligature) signs; their combined semantic value is unknown beyond the individual components, which are themselves only partially decoded.
- M386?, M096?, M066? — Signs read with uncertainty in the transliteration (query marks); surface erosion prevents independent confirmation from the photograph.
Reasoning ↓
Photo examined directly. The obverse (upper image) shows a heavily worn, cracked clay surface with multiple rows of impressed and incised proto-cuneiform signs; surface erosion and a central crack running horizontally make many individual wedge clusters difficult to read with certainty. The numerical signs — small round impressions consistent with N01 (single units) and one larger impression consistent with N14 (higher-order unit) — are visible in the right-hand column and broadly confirm the transliteration's repeated '2(N01)' and final '2(N14)'. Complex sign clusters in the left-hand portions of each line are too eroded and small at this resolution to verify against individual M-numbers. The reverse (lower image) shows two round impressions (possibly numerical or seal-related) in the upper left and a single complex sign cluster in the centre, consistent with a summary or seal impression field; this matches the final summary line in the transliteration. The sign-list identifiers (M-numbers) follow the Englund–Grégoire MDP 17 / CDLI proto-Elamite / proto-cuneiform sign system; because proto-cuneiform signs of this period are only partially decoded, a word-for-word English translation is not possible — the rendering above reflects the structural logic (entries + total) rather than lexical content. Confidence is low because of surface damage, the intrinsic undecipherability of many proto-cuneiform signs, and the impossibility of verifying individual complex sign clusters from the available photograph.
Generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 · prompt 2026-05-12/v4-interpretation · May 15, 2026 · 1993 in / 1297 out tokens
Transliteration
M327? , M388 |M106~2+M288| M386? M124 M218 M386? M240~e M096 M288~i# , 2(N01) M124 M217 M259 M218 M288~i , 2(N01) M124 M352~n M254~a M096 M288~i , 2(N01) M219 M387~c M066 M288~i , 2(N01) M124 M096? M227 M066? M288~i , 2(N01) M124 M372 |M218+M099| M371 |M131+M388| x M218 M288~i , 2(N01)# M288~i , 2(N14)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 153. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008351) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
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.