Position in chronology
MDP 17, 285
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in what is now southwestern Iran, written in the Proto-Elamite script around 3100–2900 BCE. It records quantities of several commodities or categories — each written with a sign whose meaning is still undeciphered — tallied in a decimal-style counting system with small punched circles for units and larger ones for tens. Proto-Elamite is one of the world's earliest writing systems and remains largely unread, so we can follow the arithmetic of this bureaucrat's ledger without knowing what he was counting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening line is broken away. What survives is a short ledger: three units of one commodity, forty of another, two of a third whose label is lost, then two more of the first commodity, thirteen of a variant of the second, two of a fourth item, and one of a fifth. A final entry begins with a sign too worn to identify and its number is gone. The signs themselves remain undeciphered, so the totals are legible but the goods are not.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] , (broken) M006 : 3 (units, N01) M362 : 4 (tens, N14) — i.e. 40 [...] : 2 (units, N01) M006 : 2 (units, N01) M362~a : 1 (ten, N14) 3 (units, N01) — i.e. 13 M346 : 2 (units, N01) M101 : 1 (unit, N01) (one further sign, illegible) : [...] (number broken away) (No further inscribed lines survive; the remaining faces and edges shown in the photograph are uninscribed or broken.)
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
[...] , M006# , 3(N01)# M362# , 4(N14)# [...] , 2(N01) M006 , 2(N01) M362~a , 1(N14) 3(N01) M346 , 2(N01)# M101 , 1(N01) x , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 285. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008483) — 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.