Position in chronology
MDP 06, 394
About this tablet
A proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE — among the very earliest writing in human history. Like most tablets from this archive, it records quantities of one or more commodities under sign-categories whose exact meanings remain undeciphered. The numerical notations use the standard Uruk sexagesimal and capacity systems. It is interesting precisely because it sits at the threshold of writing: the signs here are not yet a language we can fully read, but they are clearly a systematic accounting tool, the bureaucratic skeleton of one of the world's first urban economies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too damaged and its signs too early to translate into plain sentences, but what survives is clearly an accounting entry or series of entries. A scribe at Susa recorded several categories of goods or commodities — marked by signs we cannot yet decipher — alongside small quantities: two units here, perhaps two larger units there, five units of something else, two of another measure, and a single large unit. Most of the identifying labels are still undeciphered proto-cuneiform signs; the numbers are legible but the goods they count remain unknown. The rest is lost to breakage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], M292 M250~na M388 |M347+M038~a| M057~a M387~a M017 [...], 2(N01) |M036+1(N30D)|, 2(N14)[?] x, 5(N01)[?] M288, 2(N39B) 1(N34)[?]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , M292 M250~na M388 |M347+M038~a| M057~a M387~a M017 [...] , 2(N01)# |M036+1(N30D)|# , 2(N14)#? x , 5(N01)#? M288 , 2(N39B)# 1(N34)#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 394. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008174) — 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.