Position in chronology
MDP 17, 456
About this tablet
A badly broken accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100 BCE in the proto-Elamite script — one of the world's earliest writing systems, and one that remains largely undeciphered. What survives is a ledger: a series of entries, each pairing a sign for some commodity or category with a counted quantity. We can read the numbers with confidence, but the goods being counted are written in signs whose meanings are still unknown, a reminder of how much of humanity's first bookkeeping 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 fragment of an account sheet. Each surviving line lists an item and a tally: one unit of something now lost, ten units of one commodity, one unit of another, ten of a third, then an entry too broken to read, four units of something, ten units of another good, an entry built around the number ten whose total is lost, twenty-one units of an unnamed item, and finally one unit of a last commodity. The names of the goods are written in signs no one can yet read, and the beginnings and ends of several lines have crumbled away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [...entry broken...] [... commodity lost ...] — 1 unit (1 N01) M206~g (undeciphered commodity, reading uncertain) — 10 units (1 N14) [... commodity lost ...] — 1 unit (1 N01) M352~a (undeciphered commodity) — 10 units (1 N14) M297~b M030~a ... [...] — [quantity lost] [...] ... — 4 units (4 N01) M453 (undeciphered commodity) — 10 units (1 N14) M351+1(N14) (compound sign incorporating the numeral 10) — [quantity lost] [... commodity lost ...] — 21 units (2 N14 1 N01) M449~b (undeciphered commodity) — 1 unit (1 N01)
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
[...] , [...] , 1(N01) M206~g#? , 1(N14)# [...] , 1(N01) M352~a , 1(N14) M297~b M030~a x [...] , [...] [...] x , 4(N01) M453 , 1(N14) |M351+1(N14)| , [...] [...] , 2(N14) 1(N01) M449~b , 1(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 456. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008654) — 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.