Position in chronology
MDP 17, 300
About this tablet
A small, badly broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written in Proto-Elamite — a script used around 3100–2900 BCE that has never been fully deciphered. What survives is clearly an account: a few commodity or household signs, each followed by numbers impressed with a round stylus. Even though we cannot say what was being counted, the structure is unmistakable — someone was tallying goods, entry by entry, and the tablet was later broken and its numbers left half-legible. It is one of thousands of such economic records from the earliest bureaucracy of the Iranian plateau.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is the wreckage of a ledger page. The first surviving line records one large unit plus one measure of something; the item name is gone. The second line names three signs — a commodity or an account-holder — but its quantity has broken off. The third line credits nine units and two more of a commodity written with the M297 sign. Two further lines survive only as scraps, one of them apparently ending in three units. Everything else, including whatever was written on the back, is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) 1. [...] — 1(N14) 1(N39B) [i.e. one "ten"-unit and one N39B measure] 2. M139 M048~d M288 — [numeral broken away] 3. M297~b(?) — 9(N01) 2(N01) [nine units, two units] 4. [...] x [...] — [...] 5. [...] — [...] 3(N01)(?) [...] (The remainder of the surface, and the reverse, are broken away or uninscribed; no further signs are preserved.)
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
[...] , 1(N14) 1(N39B) M139 M048~d M288 , [...] M297~b# , 9(N01) 2(N01)# [...] x [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 3(N01)# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 300. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008498) — 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.