Position in chronology
MDP 06, 312
About this tablet
A badly fragmented proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, southwestern Iran), dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE — among the very earliest writing in human history. It records quantities of commodities or goods, tallied with numerical notations, in the characteristic format of proto-Elamite accounting: a sign identifying the item, followed by a number. The script remains undeciphered, so the specific commodity names cannot be read, but the numerical system is understood well enough to recover the counts. Tablets like this were the bookkeeping tools of a complex urban economy at one of the ancient Near East's most important early cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is an account of several different commodities or categories of goods, each recorded with a quantity: one entry totals one large unit (N24), another records three small units, a third records two small units, and a fourth also records two small units. Several lines are broken or too damaged to read in full. The commodity names themselves remain unknown because proto-Elamite script has not been deciphered — we can read the numbers, but not what was being counted.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] x M240, [...] [...] x M223 M044, 1(N24) M218, [...] [...], 3(N01) M314 x M096, 2(N01) M218 M032, [...] [...], 2(N01)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] x M240# , [...] [...] x M223# M044 , 1(N24) M218 , [...] [...] , 3(N01) M314# x M096 , 2(N01) M218 M032 , [...] [...] , 2(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 312. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008101) — 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.