Position in chronology
MDP 17, 465
About this tablet
A small clay account fragment from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little after 3100 BCE in proto-Elamite — a script invented in Iran shortly after, and partly in imitation of, the earliest writing at Uruk in Mesopotamia. It lists several entries, each closing with a round stylus impression for '10', and ends with a grand total of eighty-five units of whatever commodity or persons the accountant was tracking. Proto-Elamite has never been deciphered, so we can read the arithmetic perfectly but not the words: the numbers survive, the nouns do not. It is a poignant reminder that bookkeeping is legible across five thousand years in a way that language is not.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a broken page of an accountant's ledger. Each surviving line names a commodity or category — written with signs we cannot yet read — followed by its quantity: ten units, ten units, ten units again. The opening line and one line further down are too damaged to make out, and the left edge of every entry has broken away. At the bottom the scribe drew the account together: eighty-five units in all, written as eight large circular impressions and five small ones. What was being counted remains unknown.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] M388 M032 (x) M096 M288(?) , [...] 2. [...] M288 , 1(N14) 3. M032 M128~da M096 M288 , 1(N14) [...] 4. [...] (x) M288 , 1(N14) 5. M103~3 M032 (x) [...] , [...] (Total) 6. [...] , 8(N14) 5(N01) (Signs marked # are damaged on the tablet; (x) marks an illegible sign; [...] marks a break. The M-numbers are sign designations from the proto-Elamite sign list — their phonetic and semantic values are not established, so they are left untranslated. The numerals are written with the round stylus-impressions of the Susa numerical system: N14, the large circular impression, and N01, the small round impression; in the sexagesimal system used for discrete counted objects 1(N14) equals 10 N01, so the closing total of 8(N14) 5(N01) amounts to eighty-five units.)
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
[...] M388# M032 x M096 M288#? , [...] [...] M288# , 1(N14) M032 M128~da M096 M288 , 1(N14) [...] [...] x M288# , 1(N14) M103~3 M032 x [...] , [...] [...] , 8(N14)# 5(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 465. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008663) — 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.