Position in chronology
MDP 17, 258
About this tablet
A Proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern southwest Iran), dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE — among the very earliest writing in the world. It records quantities of commodities (the exact goods are undeciphered, as Proto-Elamite has not been fully read) against numerical notations using the standard Proto-Elamite counting system. Tablets like this one were produced by scribes managing temple or palace redistribution networks at one of the most important ancient cities outside Mesopotamia. The text survives in fragments and its signs are only partially legible, but the accounting structure — commodity sign followed by number — is clear.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary accounting record. Several commodity entries each list one unit of an unidentified good. A longer, more complex entry groups several signs together — possibly a compound commodity category or a heading — with a broken numeral. Further lines record larger units (N30C) of two or three more commodity types: two N30C units of one item, one N30C unit of another. The final legible line records a small total or sub-entry of two N01 units and two N39B units beside an unidentified sign. The beginning and end of the tablet are broken away, and many of the commodity names remain undeciphered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] M218, 1 (unit N01) M243~j, 1 (unit N01) M002, 1 (unit N01) M266~b M066 M352~o M246~b M066 M387# [...], [...] [...], 1 (unit N30C) M387~a# M036#, 2 (unit N30C) M001, 1 (unit N30C)# [x x] M288#, 2 (unit N01) 2 (unit N39B)# [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] M218 , 1(N01) M243~j , 1(N01) M002 , 1(N01) M266~b M066 M352~o M246~b M066 M387# [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N30C) M387~a# M036# , 2(N30C) M001 , 1(N30C)# x x M288# , 2(N01) 2(N39B)# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 258. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008456) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.