Position in chronology
MDP 17, 173
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little after 3100 BCE in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script. It is an account: a scribe recorded a short list of commodities or recipients, each entry followed by a quantity impressed into the clay with the round end of a stylus. We can read the numbers with confidence — thirty, ten, thirty, twenty, then some single units — but not what was being counted, because no one has yet cracked the proto-Elamite sign system. Tablets like this one are among the oldest bookkeeping documents on earth, and they show an administration counting carefully long before we can say what it counted.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged ledger. Each line names something — a commodity, an official, a household — and gives an amount: thirty of the first item, ten of another, thirty more of the entry written with the signs M084 and M388, then twenty. Further down the amounts drop to single units, two and two. Several lines have lost their numbers to breakage, and the names of the goods themselves are written in a script we cannot yet read, so what is being tallied remains unknown. The reverse continues in the same way but is too worn and cracked to follow.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse and reverse are not distinguished in the transliteration; entries are given as sign(s), followed by numerical notation.) […] — 3(N14) M377 M175 […] […] — [broken] […] […] — 1(N14) M084 M388 — 3(N14) M066 M219 M438(?) — [broken] […] — 2(N14) […] — [broken] […] — [broken] […] — 2(N01) M305 […] — [broken] […] — 2(N01)(?) (N14 = the large round impression, standing for ten units of the basic counted item; N01 = the small round impression, standing for one unit. The commodity signs M377, M175, M084, M388, M066, M219, M438 and M305 are proto-Elamite signs whose readings are not established.)
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
x , 3(N14) M377 M175 x [...] , [...] [...] x , 1(N14) M084 M388 , 3(N14) M066 M219 M438#? , [...] [...] , 2(N14) x , [...] x , [...] [...] , 2(N01) M305 x , [...] [...] , 2(N01)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 173. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008371) — 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.