Position in chronology
MDP 17, 467
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the proto-Elamite script — one of the world's earliest writing systems, and one still largely undeciphered. The numerals can be read with confidence (units, capacity measures, and a larger counting unit), but the accompanying word-signs have no agreed sound or meaning, so we can see the shape of a transaction — commodities entered against quantities, apparently closing with a total — without knowing what was counted or for whom. The tablet is broken across the middle, and only the upper part of the account survives.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short ledger, and about half of it is gone. Under a heading written with two combined signs, the scribe entered a series of commodity or account labels — none of which we can pronounce — each followed by a figure: one unit here, one measure of capacity there, then three units and two measures further down. The last surviving line looks like a total: one large counting unit. Everything below the break, including whatever stood on the reverse, is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) (head-sign) |M175+M153| M124 M243~aa [...] , [...] [...] M301~g , 1(N01@b) M243~aa , 1(N39B@b) [...] [...] , [...] 3(N01) 2(N39B) 1(N34) (Rendered as an account:) Heading: |M175+M153|. M124, M243~aa, [broken] — [quantity broken]. [broken], M301~g — 1 (N01@b). M243~aa — 1 (N39B@b), [remainder broken]. [broken] — [broken], 3 (N01), 2 (N39B). Total(?): 1 (N34). (The lower portion of the tablet and the reverse are broken away; no further signs are preserved in the transliteration.)
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
|M175+M153| , M124 M243~aa [...] , [...] [...] M301~g , 1(N01@b) M243~aa , 1(N39B@b) [...] [...] , [...] 3(N01) 2(N39B) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 467. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008665) — 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.