Position in chronology
MDP 17, 100
About this tablet
A very early accounting tablet from Susa (southwestern Iran), dating to the proto-literate Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE, making it among the oldest written documents in human history. It records quantities of commodities (their exact nature is unknown, as most signs remain undeciphered) tallied against numerical notations using the archaic sexagesimal or capacity system. Tablets like this one are the immediate precursors of writing itself: not literature, not law, but the bookkeeping needs of a complex urban economy. The signs are proto-Elamite or proto-cuneiform, and their phonetic values, if any, cannot yet be read.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records several entries, each pairing one or two commodity signs — the exact goods are still unknown to scholars — with numerical quantities (counts such as '1' or '2' in an archaic notation system). The entries are laid out in a columnar register format typical of early temple or palace accounting. Several lines are too broken or damaged to read. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineLine 1: M291, M036 — 1(N30C) Line 2: M387[?], M036 — 2(N30C) Line 3: M010[?] — [...] Line 4: [...] M010[?] — 1(N30C) Line 5: M124, |M217+M124|, M066[?], x — [...] Line 6: [...] |M036+1(N30D)|[?] — [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
M291 M036 , 1(N30C)# M387# M036 , 2(N30C) M010# , [...] [...] M010# , 1(N30C) M124 |M217+M124| M066# x , [...] [...] |M036+1(N30D)|# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 100. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008298) — 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.