Position in chronology
MDP 17, 182
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written in the still-undeciphered Proto-Elamite script around 3100–2900 BCE. It is an accounting document: a short column of commodity or institutional signs, each followed by a quantity, and the surface was rolled with a cylinder seal showing figures and plant or animal motifs — the seal of the official who guaranteed the transaction. Because Proto-Elamite is not yet read, we can recover the arithmetic (the largest entry is forty-eight units) but not the names of the goods or people involved. Tablets like this one, excavated at Susa and now in the Louvre, are among the earliest bureaucratic records from Iran.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A ledger fragment. The first line records forty-eight units of one commodity — the sign for it is unread — with more of the entry broken away. Below it come a series of single-unit entries against further unidentified goods, one of them measured in a different system (two of one measure and one of another). Two more lines survive only as commodity signs, their amounts lost to damage, and a final entry records one unit. The tablet is sealed with a cylinder-seal impression, the ancient equivalent of a signature or stamp of authorization.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) M362~gc M059~d — 4(N14) 8(N01) [...] [M269] — 1(N01) M106~a — 1(N01) 2(N39B) 1(N24) M009 — 1(N01) [...] [M206~g] — [quantity lost] [M102~d] — [quantity lost] M309~a — 1(N01) (The remainder of the tablet, including the reverse, is uninscribed or lost; the surviving surface bears a seal impression.) Note on the numerals: 4(N14) 8(N01) = forty-eight units in the decimal-type sequence (N14 = ten N01); 2(N39B) and 1(N24) belong to a separate capacity system and are given here as written.
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
M362~gc M059~d , 4(N14) 8(N01)# [...] [M269] , 1(N01) M106~a# , 1(N01) 2(N39B) 1(N24) M009# , 1(N01)# [...] [M206~g] , [...] [M102~d] , [...] M309~a# , 1(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 182. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008380) — 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.