Position in chronology
MDP 17, 072
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from ancient Susa (southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE, among the very earliest phases of written record-keeping in human history. It records numerical quantities against sign-categories whose full meaning remains uncertain, consistent with the proto-cuneiform accounting tablets typical of this era. The tablet is too damaged and the sign values too poorly established to reconstruct the specific commodity or transaction, but the structure — commodity signs followed by numerical notations — is the standard format of Uruk-period tallying. It represents the administrative bookkeeping of one of the world's first literate bureaucracies, operating at Susa in parallel with the great accounting centres of southern Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is an accounting entry, partially broken. Certain category markers (whose meaning is not yet known) are followed by numerical counts: one entry records five units of one denomination, three of a second, and one of a third; another records one large unit, one standard unit, and one smaller unit; a third records two large units, one standard unit, and three smaller units; and a final entry records two units of something now lost. The tablet is too fragmentary to identify what commodity or goods are being counted, and several lines are broken beyond recovery.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], [...] M266~b M288 , 5(N01) 3(N39B) 1(N30C)[?] [...] x M036 M266~b M288 , 1(N14) 1(N01) 1(N39B) [...] M288 , 2(N14) 1(N01) 3(N39B) M010~1 , 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
[...] , [...] M266~b# M288 , 5(N01) 3(N39B) 1(N30C)# [...] x M036 M266~b M288 , 1(N14) 1(N01)# 1(N39B)# [...] M288# , 2(N14) 1(N01) 3(N39B) M010~1 , 2(N01) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 072. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008270) — 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.