Position in chronology
MDP 17, 099
About this tablet
A Proto-Elamite or late Uruk-period administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, southwestern Iran), dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE. It records a series of entries pairing undeciphered commodity or category signs with numerical notations — the everyday ledger-keeping of an early urban economy before writing had yet produced readable words. The tablet is heavily eroded, making individual sign forms difficult to resolve, but its columnar structure of sign + quantity is typical of the earliest accounting documents known to archaeology. Susa was a major centre where both proto-Elamite and proto-cuneiform accounting traditions overlapped, and tablets like this one are among the earliest written records anywhere on earth.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet lists a series of commodity entries, each identified by one or more category signs whose meaning we cannot yet read, paired with counts: one unit of [commodity], four units of [commodity with M036-based sign], four more of the same, one larger unit of M288, and so on down the column. Near the bottom, the totals appear to be five units plus two larger units of M288. Most of the sign identities remain undeciphered; the numbers are clear, but what exactly is being counted is lost to us.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] M038~e M057 M263~a , 1(N01) M002 |M036+1(N24)| , 4(N01) [x] |M036+1(N24)| , 4(N01) M288 , 1(N24)[?] [...] [...] , 2(N01)? [x] , 1(N01) [x] , 1(N01) M263~a , 1(N01) |M036+X| , 1(N30D) |M036+1(N24)| , [...] M288[?] , 5(N01) 2(N30C)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] M038~e# M057 M263~a , 1(N01) M002 |M036+1(N24)| , 4(N01) x |M036+1(N24)| , 4(N01) M288 , 1(N24)#? [...] [...] , 2(N01)? x , 1(N01) x , 1(N01) M263~a , 1(N01) |M036+X|# , 1(N30D) |M036+1(N24)| , [...] M288#? , 5(N01) 2(N30C)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 099. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008297) — 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.