Position in chronology
MDP 17, 436
About this tablet
A highly fragmentary Proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, southwest Iran), dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE — among the earliest writing from that region. Like most Proto-Elamite documents, it records quantities of commodities or goods, each entry closing with a small numeral (here consistently '1' in the unit called N01, with a possible '2' in one line). The script remains undeciphered: sign values are not known, so the specific goods, names, and institution involved cannot be identified. It is nonetheless a direct window into the earliest Elamite bureaucracy, a system that borrowed the idea of clay-tablet accounting from nearby Uruk but developed its own independent script.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is an administrative record — a list of commodities or transactions, each line tallying one unit of something (in one case, two units). The signs identifying the goods and responsible parties cannot yet be read, as Proto-Elamite writing remains undeciphered. Several entries at the beginning and end are too broken to recover. What survives is a column of itemized entries, each closed with the numeral '1', suggesting a careful, line-by-line accounting of discrete items or consignments. The rest is lost to breakage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] M388 M122 M242~ab M096 M388 M218 M044~c [...] , [...] [...] M388 M099 x x x M036[?] x , 1(N01) [...] M057~b M218 M386~a M259[?] M102~k[?] M371 , 1(N01) M295[?] M223 M377~e[...] , [...] [...] x |M131+M388| , 1(N01) M001 M218 , 1(N01) M032 M371 , 1(N01) M377~e x [...] , [...] [...] x M218 , 1(N01) M122 M242~ab M387 x x , 2(N01) x , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] M388# M122 M242~ab M096 M388 M218 M044~c [...] , [...] [...] M388 M099 x x x M036#? x , 1(N01) [...] M057~b M218 M386~a M259#? M102~k#? M371 , 1(N01) M295#? M223 M377~e# [...] , [...] [...] x |M131+M388| , 1(N01) M001 M218 , 1(N01) M032 M371 , 1(N01) M377~e x [...] , [...] [...] x M218 , 1(N01) M122 M242~ab M387 x x , 2(N01) x , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 436. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008634) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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Related sources
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.