Position in chronology
MDP 17, 286
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in south-western Iran, written a little after 3000 BCE in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script — the local cousin of the earliest Uruk writing of southern Mesopotamia. What survives is a short account: a column of commodity or owner signs, each followed by a small quantity marked with the round and wedge-shaped impressions of the Susa counting systems. Because the script's word-signs cannot yet be read, we know the shape of the bookkeeping — items listed, each with its number — without knowing what was being counted. The reverse is blank, and the tablet is only about a third preserved.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is the surviving upper part of a short ledger. The first entry is lost except for its quantity, two units; then one unit against a second item, and two units against a third. A longer entry follows, made up of five or six signs strung together, but the number that went with it has broken away. After that come three more single-unit entries, each against its own item — one of them counted in a different measure — and then the tablet breaks off. The back was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse [ … ] — 2 (units, N39B) [sign damaged] M002 — 1 (unit, N39B) M098(?) — 2 (units, N39B) M388 M219 M352~o M315(?) M297 x — [ amount broken away ] [x] M288 — 1 (unit, N01) M096 — 1 (unit, N24) M295~p M222(?) M288 — 1 (unit, N01) [ … ] — [ … ] (Remainder of the obverse lost; the reverse carries no writing.)
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
[...] , 2(N39B)# M002 , 1(N39B) M098#? , 2(N39B) M388 M219 M352~o M315#? M297 x , [...] x M288 , 1(N01) M096 , 1(N24) M295~p M222#? M288 , 1(N01) [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 286. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008484) — 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.