Position in chronology
MDP 17, 009
About this tablet
An early administrative tablet from Susa (southwestern Iran), dating to the late fourth millennium BCE — roughly contemporary with the earliest writing in Mesopotamia. It records quantities of unidentified commodities against a series of undeciphered sign groups, in the typical format of proto-Elamite accounting: commodity sign, then numeral. The script is proto-Elamite, a largely undeciphered writing system used in ancient Iran for economic record-keeping, closely parallel in function to proto-cuneiform from Uruk. The tablet is too damaged and its signs too incompletely deciphered to reconstruct what specific goods or institutions are involved, but its structure is that of a standard allocation or inventory list.
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 tracking quantities of various commodities. One category of goods has three units; another has a large quantity (one major unit plus one smaller unit); a further item is assigned one large unit; another entry records one smaller unit; the same commodity type as the opening entries appears again with two units. A final numerical entry, partially damaged, closes the list. What specific goods these are remains unknown — the script has not been fully deciphered. The rest of the lines are too broken or undeciphered to render in meaningful modern terms.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine|M305+X| , M387 M263~b1 , 3(N01) M361~c M263~b1 , [...] |M305+X| M380 M270~c , 1(N30C@g) 1(N30D) M038~a2 M388 , 1(N30C@g) M124 M370 , 1(N30D@g) M387 M263~b1 , 2(N01) 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
|M305+X| , M387 M263~b1 , 3(N01) M361~c M263~b1# , [...] |M305+X| M380# M270~c# , 1(N30C@g) 1(N30D) M038~a2 M388 , 1(N30C@g) M124 M370 , 1(N30D@g) M387 M263~b1 , 2(N01) 1(N34)#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 009. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008207) — 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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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.