Position in chronology
MDP 17, 257
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in Proto-Elamite — a script that has never been deciphered. What survives is plainly an account: a column of individual entries, each marked with a single unit, followed by a larger sign standing for ten, which almost certainly totals the items above. A second entry group repeats on the reverse. Even without being able to read a single word, we can watch an ancient accountant at Susa doing arithmetic, listing goods or people one by one and adding them up.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger fragment. Down the front of the tablet run a series of short entries — each naming something with two or three signs and each credited with a single unit: one, one, one, one, one. At the foot of the column stands a larger numeral, ten, evidently the sum of the entries above. The reverse begins another entry with the same opening signs as line two, but its quantity is lost. Everything else — the names of the goods, the people, the institution behind the account — is either broken away or written in a script no one can yet read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] M250~m, M058~b, M057 — 1(N01) 2. [...] M254~a, M262, M024, |M218~d+M288|, M066 — 1(N01) 3. [...] — 1(N01) 4. [...] M259, M218 — 1(N01) 5. [...] M372 — 1(N01) 6. [...] M388 — 1(N14) [= 10 units] Reverse 7. M254~a, M262, M024, [...] — [number lost] (The rest of both surfaces is broken away; the left, right, top and bottom edges preserve no legible signs.) Note: the script is Proto-Elamite and remains undeciphered. Sign names are given in their conventional catalogue designations (M-numbers); only the numerals can be read with confidence — a series of single units (1 N01 each) followed by a summation of one N14, i.e. ten units in the decimal-type system used here.
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
[...] M250~m M058~b M057 , 1(N01)# [...] M254~a# M262 M024 |M218~d+M288| M066 , 1(N01) [...] , 1(N01)# x M259 M218 , 1(N01)# x M372 , 1(N01)# [...] M388 , 1(N14) M254~a M262 M024 [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 257. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008455) — 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.