Position in chronology
MDP 17, 144
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in what is now southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3200–3000 BCE, among the very earliest stages of writing anywhere on earth. The surviving signs record quantities (the numeral '1' appears twice) alongside commodity or category markers whose precise meanings have not yet been fully decoded. This is a proto-Elamite or proto-cuneiform accounting document: a bureaucrat at Susa was tracking goods or rations in a system of notation that was just being invented. Its interest lies precisely in that incompleteness — we are watching the birth of writing, and we cannot yet read every word.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too fragmentary and the sign system too early to render as fluent prose. What survives shows at least two entries, each recording a quantity of '1' (one unit of something) alongside category markers that indicate what type of commodity is being counted. The surrounding commodity signs and qualifiers are present but their phonetic or semantic values remain undeciphered. Several lines are broken away entirely on both sides, and what remains amounts to partial accounting entries — two counts of one unit each, in categories we cannot yet name.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] M054 M144 [...] , [...] [...] M388 x M220 M218 , 1(N01) M144 [...] , [...] M388 M347 M110~b M371 , 1(N01) M144 [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] M054# M144# [...] , [...] [...] M388 x M220 M218 , 1(N01) M144 [...] , [...] M388 M347 M110~b M371 , 1(N01) M144 [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 144. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008342) — 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.