Position in chronology
MDP 17, 463
About this tablet
A broken clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script. It records a short list of counted items — two here, one there — each tagged with a sign identifying the commodity or the department it belonged to, and closes with a total of fifteen. We can read the numbers with confidence because proto-Elamite numerals are well understood, but the words for what was being counted remain unreadable, which is the ordinary condition of this earliest Iranian bureaucracy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries read like a ledger column: two units under one heading, another two under a second, then single units listed one after another, several of them with the commodity name broken away. At the bottom the scribe drew the sum — fifteen — beneath the same category mark that runs through the whole account. What the fifteen things actually were, the script no longer tells us; the last line holds a single sign too damaged to identify.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse […] M203~e, M346~b — 2 (units) M377, M298, M001(?) […] — […] […] M377(?), M099, M390, M218, M346~b — 2 (units) M348 […] — […] […] — 1 (unit) M206~d, M346~b — 1 (unit) […] — 1 (unit) M254~a, M295~b(?) […] — […] M346~b — 15 (units: 1 N14 + 5 N01) (one further sign, illegible) — […]
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] M203~e M346~b , 2(N01) M377 M298 M001#? [...] , [...] [...] M377#? M099 M390 M218 M346~b , 2(N01) M348 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) M206~d M346~b , 1(N01)# [...] , 1(N01) M254~a M295~b#? [...] , [...] M346~b# , 1(N14) 5(N01) x , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 463. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008661) — 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.