Position in chronology
MDP 06, 385
About this tablet
A small, damaged administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), written in the proto-Elamite script — one of the world's earliest writing systems, and still not fully deciphered. The tablet records commodity allocations or inventories, pairing undeciphered sign clusters with numerical notations: groups of units in the N01 and N30 counting systems. It is one of thousands of such proto-Elamite accounting documents that reveal a sophisticated prehistoric bureaucracy managing goods across a wide region, even before writing had developed into a vehicle for language.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records several entries of goods or commodities, each paired with a count. One category receives 5 units; another variant of a related category, 4 units; a combined or sub-categorized form of the same, another 4 units; and a final entry, heavily damaged, appears to record quantities in a larger-unit notation (something like 4 tens, 2 fives, and 1 unit — though those last figures are broken and uncertain). The signs naming the actual commodities remain undeciphered, so we know the numbers but not what was being counted. The rest of the first line is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineLine 1: [Signs M305 M387 M131 M309 M032 M096 M263] , [...] Line 2: M036 , 5(N01) Line 3: M387~c × M218 M266~b[?] , 4(N01) Line 4: |M036+1(N30D)| , 4(N01) Line 5: M036[?] , [4(N39B)] [2(N30C)] [1(N30D)]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
M305 M387 M131 M309 M032 M096 M263 , [...] M036 , 5(N01) M387~c x M218 M266~b# , 4(N01) |M036+1(N30D)| , 4(N01) M036#? , 4(N39B)# 2(N30C)# 1(N30D)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 385. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008165) — 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.