Position in chronology
MDP 06, 283
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged administrative tablet from Susa (southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE. It belongs to the proto-Elamite or late proto-cuneiform administrative tradition — one of the earliest writing systems ever used, and still largely undeciphered. The tablet records quantities (we can read numbers such as 5 and 1) associated with sign-groups that likely denote commodities or categories of goods managed by a temple or palace institution. It is a fragment of the ancient world's earliest paperwork: the bookkeeping that made large-scale economic organisation possible for the first time.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet opens with a heading sign whose meaning is not yet known. What follows is a series of entries, each pairing one or more commodity signs with a numerical count: one entry records a quantity of 5 units, another records 1 unit of something, and a further entry again records 5 units. Several lines are too damaged or broken to read. The rest of the tablet's content is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineM157 [heading/rubric sign] , M383~j[?] x |M305+M009| , [...] [...] , [...] 5 M305 M049~e M066 M346~b , 1 [...] [...] x M346~b , 5 M147~a [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
M157# , M383~j#? x |M305+M009| , [...] [...] , [...] 5(N01) M305 M049~e M066 M346~b , 1(N01) [...] [...] x M346~b , 5(N01) M147~a [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 283. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008076) — 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.