Position in chronology
MDP 06, 310
About this tablet
This is a proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa, dating to around 3100–2900 BCE — one of the earliest attempts at record-keeping in human history, contemporary with the very first writing in Mesopotamia. The tablet records quantities of commodities or livestock under several category signs, opened by a rubric or heading sign and followed by a column of numerical entries. Proto-Elamite script remains undeciphered at the phonetic level, so the commodity signs can be identified visually but not read as words; the numbers, however, are unambiguous. Tablets like this represent the bureaucratic heartbeat of early Susa: quantities of goods tallied and tracked by an institution whose name and language we cannot yet recover.
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 or category marker whose meaning is still unknown. Below it, several lines each list a commodity sign — different categories of goods or animals, possibly including sub-grades or age-classes of the same item — paired with a count: 8 units of one type, 1 of another, 6 of a third, 18 of a fourth, 9 of another, then 30-something of a further category. The last two lines are too damaged to read in full. The rest is lost or broken.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineM157 [rubric/heading sign] M319 M218 M321~fa , 8 [...] , 1 M032 , 6 M376 , 1(×10) + 8 [...] , 9 M311[?] M376 , 3(×10) + [...] [...] M321~f , 2 [...] M321~ha , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
M157 , M319 M218 M321~fa , 8(N01) [...] , 1(N01) M032 , 6(N01) M376 , 1(N14) 8(N01)# [...] , 9(N01) M311#? M376 , 3(N14) [...] [...] M321~f , 2(N01) [...] M321~ha , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 310. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008099) — 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.