Position in chronology
MDP 17, 155
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Susa (ancient Elam, southwestern Iran), dating to the late Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE, among the very earliest phases of writing anywhere in the world. It is a proto-Elamite or proto-cuneiform accounting record, listing commodities or institutional categories alongside numerical notations. The signs have not been phonetically deciphered, so we cannot read the words aloud, but the structured layout — sign groups followed by numbers — is unmistakably bookkeeping. Tablets like this are the earliest evidence of complex economic administration in ancient Iran, tracking goods or animals through a temple or palace system.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Each line records a category of goods (still undeciphered) alongside a quantity: one large unit in the first entry, three smaller units in the second, three in the fourth, and three in the sixth. Several entries are broken and their commodity signs are partially or wholly lost. The tablet is too damaged and the script too early to read aloud, but the accounting structure is clear: someone was carefully tracking amounts of multiple different commodities, probably for a temple or palace storehouse.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineLine 1: [M288], 1 (large unit) Line 2: M206~d, M288, 3 (small units) Line 3: M004, |M106+M288| [?], [...], [...] Line 4: [...], M301, |M296+M296|, M057, M288, 3 (small units) Line 5: M242~b, M295~yb, M281~g, M386~a, M066 [?], [...], [...] Line 6: [...], M386~a, M218, M288, 3 (small units)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.