Position in chronology
MDP 17, 263
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from Susa (southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE — among the very earliest writing in human history. It records quantities of one or more commodities against undeciphered sign-groups, in the terse numerical format typical of early administrative bookkeeping. The signs are proto-Elamite or proto-cuneiform in character and remain largely undeciphered, so the exact goods and parties involved cannot be identified. Tablets like this were the first attempts by ancient administrators to track goods and resources in permanent written form.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This fragment records several entries of quantities — two units here, two units there, a single unit at the top — against commodity or category signs that we cannot yet read. Most of the left side is broken away, and the signs that survive belong to a script still not fully deciphered. What we can say is that someone at Susa was carefully tallying goods, probably in a temple or palace storehouse, using the earliest known writing system. The rest of the entries are lost to breakage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N01) [...] M318~a M259 M218 |M036+1(N30D)| , 2(N30C) [...] |M036+1(N30D)| , 2(N30C) M387 |M036+1(N30D)| , 2(N30C) [...] , 2(N39B) 1(N30C)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , 1(N01)# [...] M318~a M259 M218 |M036+1(N30D)| , 2(N30C)# [...] |M036+1(N30D)| , 2(N30C) M387 |M036+1(N30D)| , 2(N30C) [...] , 2(N39B) 1(N30C)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 263. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008461) — 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.