Position in chronology
MDP 17, 255
About this tablet
A broken clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script around 3100–2900 BCE. Each surviving line pairs a sign or group of signs — an owner, an institution, or a commodity — with a number impressed by the round end of a stylus. The last line switches to a different set of numerical signs, the ones used for grain or other measured produce, so the account seems to move from counting discrete items to measuring bulk goods. We can read the arithmetic perfectly well; what is being counted remains unknown.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a short ledger. The opening entry is lost. Then: one unit against a heading written with two signs; one unit against another; one more unit against a third. Next comes an entry marked with a sign combined with the numeral ten, credited with five units. A further line begins with two signs but its quantity has broken away, and another line records five units against a lost heading. The final entry uses grain-measure notation — two of one measure, one of another, two of a third. The reverse of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) […] — (entry heading lost) […] M024 M264~a — 1 (unit, N01) […] M263~a(?) — 1 (unit, N01) […] M260 — 1 (unit, N01) |M036 + 10 (N14)| — 5 (units, N01) M111 M388 […] — [amount lost] […] — 5 (units, N01) […] — 2 (N39B) 1 (N24) 2 (N30C) (reverse: uninscribed)
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 photo4 uncertain terms ↓
- M024, M036, M111, M260, M263~a, M264~a, M388 — Proto-cuneiform logograms whose referents (commodity, institution, person-type) remain undeciphered or only tentatively identified in current scholarship. No standard English rendering is possible.
- N39B, N24, N30C — Metrological numerical signs whose precise commodity-specific values are debated; the combination on the last line may represent a capacity or area measure, but the system cannot be determined without knowing the commodity being counted.
- |M036+1(N14)| — A compound sign consisting of logogram M036 combined with the large-unit numeral N14, possibly indicating a title, institutional category, or modified count. The exact meaning is unclear.
- M263~a#? — The '#' and '?' in the transliteration indicate the reading is uncertain even for the original transliterator; the sign may be damaged or ambiguous on the tablet surface.
Reasoning ↓
The photograph shows several fragments of a small clay tablet (museum number Sb 22418, Louvre). The main inscribed fragment (centre-left of the image) displays bold, deeply impressed wedge-clusters and round numeral impressions characteristic of the proto-cuneiform Uruk period. Several horizontal bands of signs are visible; I can confirm the presence of repeated round impressions consistent with N01 numerals on the right side of the inscribed face, and larger impressed marks toward the upper left of that fragment, consistent with the complex signs recorded in the transliteration. The pencilled '255' visible on the face is a modern catalogue number, not cuneiform. The other fragments — top, left side, right sliver, and the large flat lower piece (showing only the Sb 22418 label sticker) — are either blank, badly worn, or show surfaces with no legible incisions. Because the proto-cuneiform sign values M024, M036, M111, M260, M263, M264, M388 are not yet fully decoded in the scholarly literature, and because many signs on the main fragment are partially eroded and difficult to distinguish at this resolution, the transliteration cannot be independently verified beyond confirming numerical impressions and the general layout. Confidence is therefore low: the numerical signs partially match what I observe, but the commodity/logographic signs are too worn and the resolution too limited for secure identification.
Generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 · prompt 2026-05-12/v4-interpretation · May 15, 2026 · 2133 in / 858 out tokens
Transliteration
[...] , [...] M024 M264~a , 1(N01) [...] M263~a#? , 1(N01)# [...] M260# , 1(N01) |M036+1(N14)| , 5(N01) M111 M388 [...] , [...] [...] , 5(N01)# [...] , 2(N39B)# 1(N24)# 2(N30C)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 255. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008453) — 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.