Position in chronology
MDP 17, 155
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little over five thousand years ago in the proto-Elamite script — a writing system that has never been deciphered. What survives is clearly an account: a short column of entries, each naming something with one or more signs and then giving a number (ten in the first line, three in several others). We can read the arithmetic but not the words, so we know someone was tallying goods or livestock in small lots without knowing what they were. Tablets like this one are the everyday bookkeeping of one of the world's earliest urban bureaucracies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of a ledger. The first surviving entry records ten units of something; the next, marked with a different commodity sign, records three. A third entry is broken away before its number. Two more entries again record three units each, and a longer line listing several signs together has lost its figure entirely. One sign recurs at the end of nearly every line, probably a category marker used throughout the account. The back of the tablet carries no writing, and the left and upper edges of the piece are broken off, so the beginning of the record and its total are gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse — proto-Elamite account; the sign values are undeciphered, so the commodity words are given by their sign designations) […] M288 — 1 N14 (= 10 units) M206~d, M288 — 3 N01 (= 3 units) M004, |M106+M288|, […] — [quantity lost] […] M301, |M296+M296|, M057, M288 — 3 N01 (= 3 units) M242~b, M295~yb, M281~g, M386~a, M066(?), […] — [quantity lost] […] M386~a, M218, M288 — 3 N01 (= 3 units) (Reverse: uninscribed / no surviving signs; the surface bears only modern museum markings.)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
M288# , 1(N14)# M206~d# M288# , 3(N01) M004 |M106+M288|#? [...] , [...] [...] M301# |M296+M296| M057# M288 , 3(N01) M242~b M295~yb M281~g M386~a M066#? [...] , [...] [...] M386~a# M218 M288 , 3(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 155. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008353) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.