Position in chronology
MDP 17, 207
About this tablet
A Proto-Elamite accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, made a little over five thousand years ago, now broken into several fragments in the Louvre. Each line pairs one or two commodity signs with an impressed number — the standard bookkeeping format of the earliest writing in Iran, where round and crescent-shaped punches record quantities in a capacity system used for grain or similar rations. Proto-Elamite script has never been fully deciphered, so we can read the numbers with confidence but not the names of the goods or the people involved. What survives is the skeleton of an accounting entry: someone tallying measured amounts of several different commodities, item by item.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger, and only the numbers still speak. Line by line it lists a commodity — written with signs we cannot yet pronounce — against a measured amount: three units plus one of one kind for the first item, two smaller units for the next, then two plus a fraction, and so on down to entries of one large unit with three medium and two small. Several of the commodity names are chipped away, and the accountant's headings and totals are gone entirely. The rest of the tablet is broken, so we will never know whose account this was or what was being counted.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] M346 M081 M036 — 3(N39B) 1(N24) M380 — 2(N30C) [...] — 2(N30C) 1(N30D) M010~2 — [...] [...] — [...] 1(N30C@b)(?) M297 — 2(N30C)(damaged) [...] M036(damaged) M297 — 1(N01) 3(N39B)(damaged) [...] [...] — 1(N01) 3(N39B) 2(N30C) (The remainder of the surface, and the whole of the second inscribed face, is broken away or effaced; no further entries can be read.)
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
[...] M346 M081 M036 , 3(N39B) 1(N24) M380 , 2(N30C) [...] , 2(N30C) 1(N30D) M010~2 , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N30C@b)#? M297 , 2(N30C)# [...] M036# M297 , 1(N01) 3(N39B)# [...] [...] , 1(N01) 3(N39B) 2(N30C)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 207. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008405) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.