Position in chronology
MDP 17, 192
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the still-undeciphered Proto-Elamite script. It is an account: a scribe recorded a short list of commodity or category signs, each followed by a quantity impressed with a round stylus. Because Proto-Elamite word-signs cannot yet be read, we know the arithmetic but not the goods — this tablet tells us that someone was tallying eleven of something, thirteen of another, three and a fraction of a third. It is one of thousands of such bookkeeping documents from the earliest bureaucratic archive of Iran, now in the Louvre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries read like a ledger column: one commodity, eleven units; another, ten or so (the number is damaged); a third category, written with two repeated signs, thirteen units. A further line preserves only the figure three. Then three units and a fraction of one commodity, a single unit of another, and a final entry whose quantity has broken off. The signs naming the goods themselves belong to a script no one can yet read, so only the numbers speak clearly. The rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse [...] M376 — 1(N14) 1(N01) [= 11 units] M124 — 1(N14)(?) [...] [...] M124, M374~c, M124 — 1(N14) 3(N01) [= 13 units] [...] — [...] 3(N01) M376 — 3(N01) 1(N08A) [3 units and a fraction] M374~c — 1(N01) M376 M203~a — [...] (The remainder of the tablet is broken away; the reverse and edges preserve no legible signs.)
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
[...] M376# , 1(N14) 1(N01)# M124# , 1(N14)#? [...] [...] M124# M374~c M124 , 1(N14) 3(N01)# [...] , [...] 3(N01)# M376 , 3(N01)# 1(N08A) M374~c , 1(N01) M376 M203~a , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 192. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008390) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
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.