Position in chronology
MDP 17, 180
About this tablet
A small, badly broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script about 3100–2900 BCE. It is an accounting document: each line pairs one or more commodity or category signs with a small number, counted in the simple N01 unit — quantities of one, two and three. Because proto-Elamite words cannot yet be read, we can see the shape of the bookkeeping — entries, subtotals, an accountant's tidy columns — without knowing what was being counted. It is one of thousands of such receipts from the world's first bureaucratic experiment outside Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a fragment of a ledger. The first entry is headed by a compound sign whose number is lost; the next records one unit; then a line with three signs whose figure has broken away; then two units; then a single unit against the sign M346; another entry whose amount is gone; one more unit; and a final line of three units. The last surviving line is too worn to read except for one recurring sign. The left side and the bottom of the tablet are broken off, and the back was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse (1) [compound sign |M054 + M393~f + M054~i|] (uncertain) — (no numeral preserved) (2) [...] — 1 (N01) (3) M352~n, M003~b, M390, [...] — [amount lost] (4) [...] — 2 (N01) (5) M346 — 1 (N01) (6) |M218+M101|, [one illegible sign], [...] — [amount lost] (7) [...] — 1 (N01) (8) M153, M057~a — 3 (N01) (reading of the numeral uncertain) (9) [illegible sign], M057~f (?), [illegible sign] — [amount lost] (The left and lower portions of the obverse are broken away; the reverse is 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
|M054+M393~f+M054~i|# , [...] , 1(N01) M352~n M003~b M390 [...] , [...] [...] , 2(N01) M346 , 1(N01) |M218+M101| x [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) M153 M057~a , 3(N01)# x M057~f#? x , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 180. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008378) — 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.