Position in chronology
MDP 06, 297
About this tablet
A heavily damaged proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern southwestern Iran), dating to the late Uruk period, roughly 3200–2900 BCE. It records quantities of one or more commodities against category signs whose precise meanings remain undeciphered, as proto-Elamite script has never been fully read. The tablet is part of a large archive of similar accounting documents from Susa that tracked goods — likely livestock, grain, or dairy products — through an early urban administrative system. Its fragmented state leaves most entries incomplete, but the structure of sign-groups paired with numerical notations is characteristic of the proto-Elamite accounting tradition.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too broken to read in full. What survives records entries from what appears to be an administrative ledger: one line notes a quantity of roughly 3 units and 1 larger unit of some commodity associated with a category sign (M288); another line links several category signs (M124, M386~a, M024, M371) in what looks like a grouped account entry; a further line records 2 larger units and 1 medium unit of something. A final legible entry combines a complex compound sign with additional category markers. The rest of the text is lost to breakage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] [...] [...] M288, 3(N01) 1(N39B)# [...] [...] [...] [...] M124 M386~a M024 M371 [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] 2(N39B) 1(N24) M124# x [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] |M317+M260|#? M054 M386~a M124 x [...] [...] [...] [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] , [...] [...] M288 , 3(N01) 1(N39B)# [...] [...] , [...] [...] M124 M386~a M024 M371 [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N39B) 1(N24) M124# x [...] , [...] [...] , [...] [...] |M317+M260|#? M054 M386~a M124 x [...] , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 297. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008087) — 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.