Position in chronology
MDP 17, 159
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the late Uruk period, roughly 3200–3000 BCE — among the very earliest written records known anywhere in the world. It is written in proto-Elamite or a closely related proto-cuneiform script, and records what appear to be commodity entries paired with numerical notations, the standard format for early accounting documents. The signs remain largely undeciphered, so the specific goods and quantities cannot be read with certainty. It survives in several fragments and is held at the Louvre, catalogued as Sb 22336.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a broken accounting record. The surviving portions list what appear to be one or more categories of goods alongside small numerical counts — at least a group of three units in one line, and three units again near the end. Several commodity signs and classifiers appear between the numbers, but their exact meaning is not yet known. Most of the text is too damaged or too poorly understood to read in full; the rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Sign cluster M136+M365(?)], [M351 + 3(N01)] [...] , [...] [...] M195 M388 M371 M387 x [...] , [...] [...] M004 |M106+M288|(?) M066 , 3(N01)[?]
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|# , |M351+3(N01)| [...] , [...] [...] M195 M388 M371 M387 x [...] , [...] [...] M004 |M106+M288|# M066 , 3(N01)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 159. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008357) — 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.