Position in chronology
MDP 17, 189 + 336
About this tablet
A proto-Elamite accounting tablet from Susa, in southwestern Iran, made around 3100–2900 BCE — one of the oldest kinds of written document on earth. Its script is still undeciphered, so we can read the bookkeeping but not the words: each line pairs a sign or group of signs (a commodity, a person, or an institution) with a quantity impressed into the clay with the round end of a stylus. The tablet, now in the Louvre as two joined fragments, is a ledger of about ten entries under a single heading, each debiting or crediting a measured amount. What survives is the skeleton of an administration whose language we have lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a broken ledger sheet. Under a single heading, the scribe listed roughly ten entries, each naming a party or commodity and setting a number beside it: one unit for the first, an amount now lost for the second, two units, one unit, one large unit (uncertain), two units, then one big measure plus one small, another single unit, one unit again, and finally one measure of a different kind together with two units. The signs themselves cannot be read — proto-Elamite has never been deciphered — and several entries are damaged or missing entirely where the clay has flaked away. The reverse is blank apart from one large impressed sign.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [Heading:] |M175+M136| M380 M266~b M263 — 1(N01) M387~ef — [numeral broken away] [sign(s) broken away] — 2(N30C) M010~2 — 1(N30C) M387~a M002 — 1(N30C@b)(?) M294~a M050~k4 — 2(N30C) M036 — 1(N24) 1(N30C) [one unread sign] — 1(N30C) M387~a M346 M081 — 1(N01) [sign(s) broken away] — 1(N39B) 2(N30C) (Reverse: uninscribed apart from a single large sign; no further entries preserved.)
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
|M175+M136| , M380 M266~b# M263 , 1(N01) M387~ef , [...] [...] , 2(N30C) M010~2# , 1(N30C) M387~a# M002 , 1(N30C@b)? M294~a M050~k4 , 2(N30C) M036 , 1(N24) 1(N30C)# x , 1(N30C) M387~a# M346 M081 , 1(N01) [...] , 1(N39B) 2(N30C)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 189 + 336. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008387) — 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.