Position in chronology
MDP 17, 116
About this tablet
This is a Proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, southwest Iran), dating to the late fourth millennium BCE — roughly contemporary with the earliest writing in Mesopotamia. Like most Proto-Elamite documents, it records quantities of commodities or livestock under category signs whose phonetic values remain undeciphered, making a conventional word-for-word translation impossible. Each line appears to follow the standard Proto-Elamite format: a commodity classifier or heading sign, followed by a counted item, followed by a numeral — here the repeated '1(N01)', the basic unit-tally sign. Proto-Elamite is the world's most extensive undeciphered writing system, and tablets like this one from the Louvre's Susa collection are central to ongoing attempts to crack it.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records a series of commodity entries, each line noting a category of goods or animals identified by a classifier sign, followed by subordinate sign-groups and a tally of one unit. Because Proto-Elamite remains undeciphered, the actual names of the commodities cannot be read — we can see the accounting structure clearly, but not what was being counted. Several lines are broken or too damaged to read. The reverse of the tablet appears nearly blank or too eroded to recover additional entries.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine|M305+M342| , M057~i M106 [...] , [...] [...] M263~1 M281~g , 1(N01) M388 x [...] , [...] [...] M004 M218 , 1(N01) M391 M320[#] [...] , [...] [...] M390 M218 , 1(N01) M315 [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
|M305+M342| , M057~i M106 [...] , [...] [...] M263~1 M281~g , 1(N01) M388 x [...] , [...] [...] M004 M218 , 1(N01) M391 M320# [...] , [...] [...] M390 M218 , 1(N01) M315 [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 116. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008314) — 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.