Position in chronology
MDP 17, 087
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the Uruk period roughly 3300–3000 BCE — among the very earliest written records in human history. The tablet records quantities of goods or commodities under repeated category markers whose precise meaning has not yet been deciphered. It belongs to a proto-Elamite or late Uruk administrative tradition in which officials tracked resources using numerical notation alongside pictographic signs. The tablet is fragmentary and its exact subject cannot be fully recovered, but the repeated numerical entries suggest it is a tally or allocation record from a temple or palace storehouse.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged accounting record. The surviving lines list quantities under repeated category headings: one entry reads approximately 22 units of something; another entry under a different sign reads 3 units; a third records roughly 2 large units, 2 medium, and 1 small; and a final legible line gives 4 units, 1 medium, and 1 small. Several lines are too broken or eroded to read. The signs naming the commodities or categories have not yet been deciphered, so we can see the numbers clearly but cannot say with certainty what goods they represent.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] |M136+M365|# M288 , 2(N14) 2(N01) M057~a M288 , 3(N01) [...] , [...] 1(N24)# M208 M288 , 2(N14) 2(N39B) 1(N24) M288 , [...] [...] , [...] M288 , 4(N01) 1(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
[...] |M136+M365|# M288 , 2(N14) 2(N01) M057~a M288 , 3(N01) [...] , [...] 1(N24)# M208 M288 , 2(N14) 2(N39B) 1(N24) M288 , [...] [...] , [...] M288 , 4(N01) 1(N39B) 1(N24)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 087. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008285) — 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.