Position in chronology
MDP 06, 266
About this tablet
This is a small, heavily damaged proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from Susa (ancient Elam, modern southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE. It records quantities — expressed in the archaic numerical notations N01 (small units) and N14 (a larger capacity or count unit) — alongside a series of ideographic signs whose precise meanings remain undeciphered. Tablets like this are among the very earliest written documents in human history, produced by administrators tracking commodities or allocations at a major urban centre. Because the signs are proto-cuneiform pictographs not yet fully understood, the specific goods or transactions recorded here cannot be identified with certainty.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives on this tablet is a list of quantities paired with ideographic symbols — numbers like 4, 6, 1, 2, and 4 again, each associated with one or more category signs whose meanings we cannot yet read. The larger numerical notation (N14) appears once, suggesting a different unit of measure or commodity at that line. The rest of the entries are too broken or too poorly understood to translate further. In essence, someone at Susa roughly five thousand years ago was tallying goods or rations in a ledger, but the damage and the early stage of the script leave most of the specifics out of reach.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 4 M374~c [...] [...] [...] [...] 6 M281~f M149~a1 M387 [...] [...] [...] M075~m(?) M149~a1 x [...] [...] [...] 1 x [...] [...] [...] [...] 4 M057 [...] [...] M387 2 (large unit) M136(?) [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] 4(N01)# M374~c# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 6(N01)# M281~f M149~a1# M387# [...] , [...] [...] M075~m#? M149~a1# x [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) x [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 4(N01)# M057# [...] , [...] M387# , 2(N14) M136#? [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 266. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008059) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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Related sources
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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.