Position in chronology
MDP 17, 054
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Susa (ancient Elam, southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE. It records quantities of commodities — their exact nature is undecipherable in the current state of proto-Elamite scholarship — against a series of sign groups that likely identify categories, sub-categories, or responsible officials. The reverse is blank or uninscribed, which is typical for short tally documents of this type. It belongs to the world's earliest bookkeeping tradition: a system of writing invented not to record speech but to track goods moving through a large redistributive institution.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too fragmentary and the script too undeciphered to render as fluent modern prose, but what survives is a tally sheet: several categories of commodities (their names unknown to us) are listed alongside numerical entries — 2 units here, 1 unit there, larger totals of 1(N14) 2(N01) 3(N39B) 1(N24) at the bottom. The top and several entries in the middle are broken away. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , M384~g M056~f M288 , 2(N01) 1(N39B) M047[?] [...] , [...] M288 , 1(N01) M010~2 , 2(N39B) 1(N24) M059~a M388 M263 M387~c [x] , [...] [...] , 4(N01) M010~2 , 3(N01) [...] , 1(N14) 2(N01) 3(N39B) 1(N24)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , M384~g# M056~f M288 , 2(N01) 1(N39B) M047#? [...] , [...] M288 , 1(N01) M010~2 , 2(N39B) 1(N24) M059~a M388 M263 M387~c# x , [...] [...] , 4(N01)# M010~2 , 3(N01)# [...] , 1(N14) 2(N01) 3(N39B) 1(N24)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 054. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008252) — 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.