Position in chronology
MDP 17, 201
About this tablet
A small, badly broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little over five thousand years ago in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script. Its surviving content is an accounting entry: a short string of commodity or category signs followed by numerals — one unit in the first entry, eight in the second. Nobody can yet read the words behind these signs, but the structure is unmistakably that of a ledger, the kind of routine bookkeeping that fills the archives of Susa's early administration. The piece is now in the Louvre, its excavation numbers still inked on its side.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an account. One heading — a cluster of five or six signs whose meanings are unknown — is followed by a quantity of one unit. A second entry, again headed by an unreadable group of signs, records eight units. Everything else has broken off: the beginnings and ends of the lines, and whatever else was written on the rest of the tablet. What survives is the skeleton of a bookkeeping record, its vocabulary lost but its arithmetic intact.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) 1. M388 (+ one illegible sign) M377~e M049~d M325~e M386~a(?) [...] , [...] 2. [...] , [...] 1(N01) (Reverse / continuation) 3. (illegible sign) M388 M066 M352~o(?) M251~c2 M066 4. [...] , 8(N01) (The remainder of both surfaces is broken away or effaced; no further signs are legible.)
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
M388 x M377~e M049~d M325~e M386~a#? [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N01)# x M388 M066 M352~o# M251~c2 M066 [...] , 8(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 201. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008399) — 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.