Position in chronology
MDP 17, 230
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written in proto-Elamite — one of the world's earliest writing systems, in use around 3100–2900 BCE and still largely undeciphered. What survives is an account: a short column of entries, each pairing a group of word-signs with a small number (2, 1, 1, 1, 6) impressed in the standard unit notation. We cannot read the commodities or the names, but the structure is unmistakably bookkeeping — someone in the Susa administration tallying goods or people entry by entry. The museum label on the edge, Sb 22396, records its home in the Louvre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is the surviving part of a short ledger. The opening line, with two damaged signs, is lost. Then come the entries: an unnamed item, 2; a group of four signs, 1; another broken entry, 1; a further pair of signs, 1; and a final lost item, 6. The commodity words themselves belong to a script no one can yet read, so the quantities are all we can recover with confidence. The rest of the tablet is broken away or blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] M332~c(?) M249~n1(?) [...] , [...] [...] , 2 (units, N01) M115~a M281~f M377~e M223 , 1 (unit, N01) [...] M218 , 1 (unit, N01) M032 M371 , 1 (unit, N01) [...] , 6 (units, N01) (No further inscribed text is preserved; the remainder of the surface, including the reverse, is uninscribed or effaced.)
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.
Engine notes
read from photo6 uncertain terms ↓
- M332~c#? — Damaged and uncertain sign; the '#' and '?' markers in the transliteration indicate the reading is tentative. Cannot be confirmed from the photograph at available resolution.
- M249~n1# — Variant of M249; the '#' signals damage. May be a different sign entirely. Not confirmable from the photo.
- M115~a M281~f M377~e M223 — A cluster of proto-cuneiform commodity signs in one line; their combined meaning — likely a specific commodity or ration category — is unclear without parallel texts to anchor interpretation.
- M218 — Interpreted in the glossary as a subtotal or section-divider sign; this function is inferred from administrative parallels, not confirmed independently.
- M032 M371 — Sign pair whose commodity referent is unknown from this fragment alone.
- N01 numerals (1, 2, 6) — The basic round-impression unit of the proto-cuneiform numerical system; what unit of measure or commodity these count cannot be determined from the surviving text.
Reasoning ↓
The photograph shows multiple views of a small, heavily damaged clay tablet fragment (museum number Sb 22396, Louvre). The obverse (upper centre image) preserves several rows of cuneiform-like wedge impressions: in the upper portion I can make out clusters of vertical wedges — consistent with the N01 numeral impressions (the round-pressed dot strokes typical of proto-cuneiform numerical notation) — and in the middle rows there are more complex sign clusters with diagonal and crossing wedges that could correspond to the commodity signs M115~a, M281~f, M377~e, M223, and M032/M371 as given in the transliteration. The lower left of the obverse shows further faint impressed strokes, degraded. The reverse (lower image) appears nearly blank or too eroded to read. The edges and a fragment to the left show the broken state of the tablet. The surface is heavily pitted and discoloured, with significant erosion obscuring fine wedge details. I cannot independently confirm sign identities beyond the general impression of numerals and commodity-sign clusters, so alignment with the transliteration is plausible but not verifiable at this resolution. The transliteration itself is clearly marked with uncertainty indicators (#, ?) throughout, and the glossary notes explicitly caution that most sign readings are inferential. Confidence is therefore low.
Generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 · prompt 2026-05-12/v4-interpretation · May 15, 2026 · 1949 in / 923 out tokens
Transliteration
[...] M332~c#? M249~n1#? [...] , [...] [...] , 2(N01)# M115~a M281~f M377~e M223 , 1(N01) [...] M218 , 1(N01) M032 M371 , 1(N01) [...] , 6(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 230. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008428) — 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.