Position in chronology
MDP 17, 146
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in what is now southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE — and written in proto-Elamite, one of the world's earliest undeciphered scripts. Like many proto-Elamite tablets, it records quantities of commodities or animals against a series of sign-categories, functioning as an account or inventory kept by a palace or temple administration. Because proto-Elamite remains undeciphered, we can read the numerical notations clearly — groups of units (N01) and higher-order values (N14, N34) — but the commodity signs themselves cannot be translated into meaningful words. This tablet is a vivid reminder that literacy and accounting emerged simultaneously across the ancient Near East, yet not every early writing system has yielded its secrets.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet lists several categories of goods or commodities — their exact nature unknown, since the script is undeciphered — each paired with a count. One category has 3 units, another 5, another 5 again; a sign that recurs twice is paired with 5 units each time, and a final entry records 1 larger unit plus an additional higher-order total of 1(N34). Several lines are too broken or damaged to read. What survives is essentially a tally sheet: entries of named things, each with its number, summed toward a total at the bottom.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine|M136+M365| , M327# [...] , [...] [...] , 3(N01) M005 , 5(N01) M321#? , [...] [...] |M327+M342| M032 , 5(N01) M321# , [...] , 5(N01)# [...] , 5(N01) M005 , 1(N14) 1(N34)
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| , M327# [...] , [...] [...] , 3(N01) M005 , 5(N01) M321#? , [...] [...] |M327+M342| M032 , 5(N01) M321# , [...] , 5(N01)# [...] , 5(N01) M005 , 1(N14) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 146. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008344) — 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.