Position in chronology
MDP 17, 222
About this tablet
A small clay account tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the still-undeciphered Proto-Elamite script. Each line pairs a sign — a commodity, a person, or an institutional category we cannot yet name — with a number impressed by pressing a round or oblique stylus into the clay: ones, and in one case a ten. The numbers can be read with confidence even though the words cannot, which is the ordinary condition of Proto-Elamite bookkeeping: we know exactly how much was counted, and not at all what it was.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short ledger: ten entries, each naming something and giving its quantity. Reading down the list: one, one, four, one, one, one, nine, one, and eleven, with a final entry of two whose heading is broken away. The largest single figure is the eleven on the ninth line. The commodity signs themselves cannot be translated — the script has never been deciphered — and several of them are damaged besides, so what survives is a set of amounts detached from the goods they once measured.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [ … ] M009(?) — 1 (unit) 2. M009(?) — 1 (unit) 3. M309~a(?) — 4 (units) 4. |M348+M288| (damaged) — 1 (unit) 5. M110~c — 1 (unit) 6. M309 — 1 (unit) 7. M009(?) — 9 (units) 8. M009(?) — 1 (unit) 9. M309~a(?) — 1 (ten) 1 (unit) [= 11] 10. [ … ] — 2 (units) (No further text is legible; the remaining surface is eroded or broken away.)
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
x M009#? , 1(N01) M009#? , 1(N01) M309~a? , 4(N01) |M348+M288|# , 1(N01) M110~c , 1(N01) M309 , 1(N01) M009#? , 9(N01) M009#? , 1(N01) M309~a#? , 1(N14) 1(N01) x , 2(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 222. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008420) — 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.