Position in chronology
MDP 17, 458
About this tablet
A broken accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–3000 BCE in the Proto-Elamite script — a system of numbers and signs that has still never been fully deciphered. What survives is a column of entries: a sign naming some commodity or category, followed by a quantity impressed into the clay with a round or pointed stylus. The numbers are perfectly legible even though the words are not, so we can watch an ancient bookkeeper tally goods without knowing what the goods were. It is one of thousands of such fragments from the Susa acropolis, now in the Louvre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger, and only the numbers still speak. Line by line it lists a commodity followed by its count: seven of something; then an entry marked M346 with a large round-unit figure plus twenty; twelve of the item marked M101; twenty or more of M009; then a big entry running to a hundred and forty-four or more, its ending broken away; then three, then a damaged line headed by M054, then three again. The signs that named the goods belong to the undeciphered Proto-Elamite script, so we can read the arithmetic but not the words. The reverse is blank, and the edges of the tablet have crumbled, taking the beginnings of several lines with them.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse [...] — 7 (units) M346~1 — 1(N23) 2(N14) […] — 1 (unit) M101 — 1(N14) 2(N01) (= 12 units) M009 — 2(N14) [...] (= 20+ units) [...] — 1(N34) 4(N14) 4(N01) [...] (= 100 + 40 + 4 …) [...] — 3 (units) M054(?) — [...] [...] — 3 (units) reverse (uninscribed / surface blank as 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
[...] , 7(N01)# M346~1 , 1(N23) 2(N14) x , 1(N01)# M101# , 1(N14) 2(N01) M009 , 2(N14)# [...] [...] , 1(N34) 4(N14) 4(N01)# [...] [...] , 3(N01) M054#? , [...] [...] , 3(N01)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 458. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008656) — 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.