Position in chronology
MDP 06, 300
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern southwest Iran), dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE — among the earliest writing in the world outside Mesopotamia. Proto-Elamite is a script that has never been fully deciphered, so the signs here record quantities (numerals 1 and 2 are visible) against commodity or category signs whose exact meaning remains unknown. Tablets like this one were the accounting tools of an early urban economy, tracking goods, animals, or labor through a bureaucratic system sophisticated enough to require written records. Its survival in the Louvre makes it part of a crucial body of evidence for understanding the independent origins of writing at Susa.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records a series of entries, each pairing one or more undeciphered category signs with a small numeral — mostly 1 or 2. Several lines are too broken to read in full. The signs M301, M338, M145~a, M371, M110~b, M380~b, and M332~d appear against these counts, but because proto-Elamite remains undeciphered, we cannot say what commodity or entity each sign names. What survives is the bare skeleton of an ancient accounting list: things counted, in small numbers, by an unknown hand at Susa over five thousand years ago. The rest is lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] x [...] , [...] [...] x , 2 [...] M024#? M295~f , 2 M301 M338 [...] , [...] [...] M157? , 1 x M145~a M371 , 2 M145~a [...] , [...] x M110~b#? M380~b , 1 M332~d , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] x [...] , [...] [...] x , 2(N01) [...] M024#? M295~f , 2(N01) M301 M338 [...] , [...] [...] M157? , 1(N01) x M145~a M371 , 2(N01) M145~a [...] , [...] x M110~b#? M380~b , 1(N01) M332~d , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 300. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008089) — 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.