Position in chronology
MDP 17, 420
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3000 BCE in the proto-Elamite script — one of the world's earliest writing systems and one that remains largely undeciphered. The numbers are readable: a scribe recorded a series of entries, each pairing a product or person with a quantity, some in whole units and some in fractions, and summed them on the back. What exactly was being counted — grain, animals, workers — we cannot yet say, because the word-signs themselves have never been cracked. It is a receipt or ledger whose arithmetic we understand but whose vocabulary is still locked away.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a bookkeeping list. It opens with a header — probably naming an owner, office, or category — and then runs through about seven line items: one unit of this, one unit of that, an entry of one whole unit plus a fraction, another of a fraction plus a smaller fraction, and a broken entry of four fractions plus a small fraction. Two entries are too damaged to read at all. On the back, the accountant added it all up and wrote the grand total: one large unit. Because the script is undeciphered, we can read the quantities but not what the goods were.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) 1. M153+M342(?) (heading/owner sign; no numeral preserved) 2. M292~d M288 — 1 (N01) 3. (illegible sign) — 1 (N01) 4. (illegible sign) [...] — [numeral lost] 5. [...] M219 M387 M240 M096 — 1 (N01) 6. M217 — 1 (N01) 1 (N39B) [...] 7. M036 — 1 (N39B) 1 (N30C) 8. [broken entry] — 4 (N39B) 1 (N30C) (Reverse/total) 9. Total: 1 (N34)
Our translation engine — Fable 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
|M153+M342|? , M292~d M288 , 1(N01) x , 1(N01) x [...] , [...] [...] M219 M387 M240 M096 , 1(N01) M217 , 1(N01) 1(N39B) [...] M036 , 1(N39B) 1(N30C) [...] , 4(N39B) 1(N30C) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 420. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008618) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.