Position in chronology
MDP 17, 159
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little after 3000 BCE in proto-Elamite — a script that remains, for the most part, undeciphered. What survives is clearly an account: sign-groups naming commodities or persons on the left, numerical notations of the N01 unit on the right, laid out in the ruled two-part format that proto-Elamite bookkeepers used everywhere. One entry has its number written inside the sign itself (three units enclosed in M351), a compact accounting habit typical of this archive. We can read the arithmetic but not the words, which is the ordinary condition of proto-Elamite documents.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged ledger. The first line records an item written with a compound sign, its quantity now lost. The second line gives another entry whose figure — three units — is written inside the sign itself, followed by a break. The third line lists a run of four or five signs before the surface fails again. The last readable line names a further set of commodities or a person and closes with the figure three. Everything below that is broken away, and 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, column i) 1. |M136+M365| (damaged) — [numeral lost] 2. |M351+3(N01)| ... [break] — [numeral lost] 3. [...] M195 M388 M371 M387 (unread sign) [...] — [numeral lost] 4. [...] M004 |M106+M288| (damaged) M066 — 3(N01) (damaged) (remainder of the obverse broken away; reverse uninscribed)
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.
Transliteration
|M136+M365|# , |M351+3(N01)| [...] , [...] [...] M195 M388 M371 M387 x [...] , [...] [...] M004 |M106+M288|# M066 , 3(N01)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 159. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008357) — 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.