Position in chronology
MDP 17, 297 + 299
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the proto-Elamite script — one of the world's earliest writing systems, and one that still cannot be read as language. What can be read are the numbers: a short ledger of seven entries, each assigning a single unit of something to a different named or classified recipient. The script's word-signs remain undeciphered, so we know the shape of the accounting but not the goods or the people. Tablets like this one, now in the Louvre, come from the administrative archives of an early urban bureaucracy that kept records in a script of its own invention rather than the Mesopotamian one next door.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short account, badly damaged along the left side. Seven entries survive, and each of them is credited with one unit: the first entry's heading is broken away, the second is lost apart from a single sign, and the remaining five each pair a small cluster of signs — presumably a name, an office, or a category of goods — with the figure 1. The signs themselves cannot be read as words; only the numerals are certain. Nothing else on the fragment is preserved.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] M386~a M024 M371[?] — 1(N01)[?] M329[?] [...] — [...] [...] M371[?] — 1(N01) M125~a M124[?] M259 M229~e1 — 1(N01) M035 M066 — 1(N01) M029~e[?] M124[?] — 1(N01) M218 M242~ab — 1(N01) (No further inscribed surface preserved; the remaining faces and edges of the fragment are blank or destroyed.)
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
[...] M386~a M024 M371# , 1(N01)# M329#? [...] , [...] [...] M371# , 1(N01) M125~a M124#? M259 M229~e1 , 1(N01)# M035 M066 , 1(N01) M029~e#? M124#? , 1(N01) M218 M242~ab , 1(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 297 + 299. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008495) — 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.