Position in chronology
MDP 17, 171
About this tablet
A small clay account tablet from Susa in south-western Iran, written a little after 3100 BCE in proto-Elamite — a script that grew up alongside the earliest Mesopotamian writing and has never been deciphered. The numbers can be read even though the words cannot: five short entries, each pairing a commodity sign with a measured quantity, followed on the back by a grand total that adds the individual amounts together. Someone in a Susa storehouse was reckoning up rations or stores and checking the arithmetic. The painted "171." on the reverse is a modern museum number, not part of the ancient text.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The front of the tablet opens with a heading sign, now chipped, and then lists five items: one unit of the first commodity, two of the second, then a measure of the third, a slightly larger measure of the fourth, and three small fractional measures of the fifth. One entry has a sign the surface damage has erased. On the back the accountant writes the sum — four large measures plus the small change carried over from the last entry — and adds a single large-unit figure beneath it. The commodity names themselves belong to an undeciphered script, so we know how much was counted but not what.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [M305+M342] (heading; damaged, no numeral) M217~a, M387~a, [M260~2 containing 1(N24)] : 1(N01) M033, M033, [M260~2 containing 1(N24)] : 2(N01) (damaged) [...], M384, M288 : 1(N39B) M387~ef, M248, [M036 containing 1(N39C)] : 1(N39B) 1(N24) M266~b, M248, (one unread sign) : 1(N30C) 1(N30D) 1(N30C@b) (total, reverse) M288 : 4(N39B) 1(N24) 1(N30C) 1(N30D) 1(N30C@b) 1(N34)
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
|M305+M342|# , M217~a M387~a# |M260~2+1(N24)| , 1(N01) M033 M033 |M260~2+1(N24)| , 2(N01)# [...] M384 M288 , 1(N39B) M387~ef M248# |M036+1(N39C)| , 1(N39B) 1(N24) M266~b M248 x? , 1(N30C) 1(N30D) 1(N30C@b) M288 , 4(N39B) 1(N24) 1(N30C) 1(N30D) 1(N30C@b) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 171. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008369) — 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.