Position in chronology
MDP 06, 273
About this tablet
One of the earliest written documents in human history, this small clay tablet fragment from Susa (in modern Iran) dates to the Uruk period, roughly 3200–3000 BCE — the very dawn of writing. It records numerical quantities against commodity or institution signs, the kind of tally a temple administrator would keep track of goods, animals, or rations. The tablet is badly damaged, with most of its pictographic signs and commodity identifiers now missing or broken away, but the surviving numerical notations — expressed in the archaic proto-cuneiform numerical system using impressed circular and linear marks — are still legible. Objects like this are the oldest surviving accounting records of any civilization, and Susa was one of the two main centers, alongside Uruk in southern Iraq, where this proto-writing system first emerged.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is a numerical accounting record. Several entries list quantities — five large units, or five large units plus four small units, or five large units plus five small units, or two medium units plus two higher-order units — alongside commodity or institution signs that are now too broken to read. The rest of the tablet is lost. In plain terms: someone was keeping count of something, probably goods or livestock, and writing down the running totals, but we can no longer tell what was being counted.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] [...] 5 (large unit) [...] [...] [...] [...] [M305+M111~c(?)] [...] [...] [...] [...] 5 (large unit) 4 (small unit) [...] [...] [...] [...] 5 (large unit) 5 (small unit) [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] 2 (medium unit) 2 (higher unit) [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] , [...] 5(N14) [...] [...] , [...] [...] |M305+M111~c|#? , [...] [...] , [...] , [...] 5(N14)# 4(N01) [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 5(N14) 5(N01) x [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N34) 2(N45) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 273. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008066) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
Related tablets
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.