Position in chronology
MDP 17, 189 + 336
About this tablet
A proto-Elamite administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE — one of the earliest writing systems ever used, and one that remains undeciphered to this day. The tablet records quantities of goods or commodities under a series of classifier signs, with numerical notations using the standard proto-Elamite system of circular and wedge impressions. It is an accounting document: someone in a large institutional household — a palace, temple, or estate — was tallying items by category. What makes it remarkable is that proto-Elamite writing predates most other scripts and was used across a vast area of ancient Iran, yet no one has yet cracked the code of what most of its signs mean.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is an accounting record listing multiple categories of goods alongside their quantities. Each line names a type of commodity or sub-category (their identities remain unknown because proto-Elamite is undeciphered) and assigns a count to it — one unit here, two there, with larger and smaller numerical denominators marking different tiers of quantity. Several lines are broken or too damaged to read. The surviving entries suggest a careful tally of several distinct commodity types, the kind of record-keeping that would have tracked the flow of goods through a large administrative institution. The rest of the text is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse: [M175+M136] , M380 M266~b M263 , 1(N01) M387~ef , [...] [...] , 2(N30C) M010~2 , 1(N30C) M387~a M002 , 1(N30C[b])? M294~a M050~k4 , 2(N30C) M036 , 1(N24) 1(N30C) [x] , 1(N30C) M387~a M346 M081 , 1(N01) [...] , 1(N39B) 2(N30C)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
|M175+M136| , M380 M266~b# M263 , 1(N01) M387~ef , [...] [...] , 2(N30C) M010~2# , 1(N30C) M387~a# M002 , 1(N30C@b)? M294~a M050~k4 , 2(N30C) M036 , 1(N24) 1(N30C)# x , 1(N30C) M387~a# M346 M081 , 1(N01) [...] , 1(N39B) 2(N30C)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 189 + 336. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008387) — 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.