Position in chronology
MDP 17, 272
About this tablet
A proto-Elamite accounting tablet from Susa, in southwestern Iran, written around 3000 BCE in a script that has never been fully deciphered. Six short entries survive, each pairing a commodity or personal designation with a small number — 2, 4, 1, 5, and so on. Because proto-Elamite numerals are securely understood while the word-signs are not, we can read the quantities but not what was being counted. It is bookkeeping whose arithmetic is transparent and whose subject matter remains locked away.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short ledger. The first line lists something — the commodity signs are damaged and unreadable — at a quantity of 2. The next entry records 4 units, then 1, then 5 against another item. A fifth line names something with a group of signs but the number beside it has broken off. The last surviving line records 1 unit plus one small subunit. Everything else on the tablet has worn away, and the reverse carries no legible writing at all.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] M096 M004 M218 x — 2(N01) x M390(?) — 4(N01) [...] — 1(N01) |M036+1(N30D)|(?) — 5(N01) M240 M370~c M004 [...] — [amount broken away] [...] — 1(N01) 1(N30D) (the remainder of the surface, and the reverse, are effaced; no further signs legible)
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
[...] M096# M004# M218# x , 2(N01) x M390? , 4(N01) [...] , 1(N01) |M036+1(N30D)|#? , 5(N01) M240# M370~c# M004# [...], [...] [...] , 1(N01) 1(N30D)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 272. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008470) — 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.