Position in chronology
MDP 17, 147
About this tablet
A proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, Iran), dating to the late fourth millennium BCE — roughly 3200–2900 BCE — and now held in the Louvre. It records quantities of one or more undeciphered commodities against numerical notations using the proto-Elamite sign system, which has not yet been fully deciphered. Tablets like this were produced by early urban administrators to track the flow of goods — perhaps animals, grain, or textile products — through a nascent bureaucratic institution. This is one of thousands of such accounting documents from Susa, representing the earliest known writing tradition outside of Mesopotamia proper.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged accounting record. Several entries list an unknown commodity (or commodities) alongside small quantities — mostly ones and twos in the standard unit, with at least one entry recording a larger unit. A few lines are too broken to read. The overall structure is a columnar ledger: commodity sign on the left, numerical count on the right. What exactly is being counted remains unknown, since the signs for the goods themselves have not yet been deciphered. The rest is lost to breakage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] M325 M263~b1, 2(N01) [x x] [...], [...] [...], 2(N01) M263~b1 M388 M297, 1(N39B) M117 M263~b1, 1(N01) [...] M131~e M263~a, 1(N01) M297, 1(N24) M301 M263~a[?], [...], 1(N01) M297[?], 1(N24) M263~a[?], [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] M325 M263~b1# , 2(N01)# x x [...] , [...] [...] , 2(N01)# M263~b1 M388 M297 , 1(N39B) M117# M263~b1 , 1(N01) [...] M131~e# M263~a , 1(N01) M297 , 1(N24) M301 M263~a#? , [...] , 1(N01)# M297# , 1(N24) M263~a#? , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 147. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008345) — 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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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.