Position in chronology
MDP 17, 210
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged proto-Elamite accounting tablet from Susa (modern Shush, southwestern Iran), dated to roughly 3100–2900 BCE — the very dawn of writing. It records a list of commodities or institutional categories alongside tally numerals, most likely a receipt or allocation record kept by a temple or palace administrator. Proto-Elamite, the writing system used here, has never been fully deciphered, so individual sign values remain unknown, but the format — commodity sign followed by the numeral 1 — is the standard bookkeeping pattern of the period. This tablet is one of thousands of such records from Susa that give us our earliest window into complex economic administration in ancient Iran.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a list — mostly one item per line, each followed by the number one. The specific goods or categories recorded are not yet decipherable, as the script has never been cracked, but the structure is clear: a scribe was tallying individual units of several different things, one of each. Several lines are too broken to read at all, and the surviving signs cannot yet be given firm commodity names. What we have is the skeleton of an ancient inventory, its contents still locked in an undeciphered language.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] M314 M338~b [...] , [...] [...] x , 1 M370 M072 , 1 x [...] , [...] x M242~ab(?) , 1 M461~q M371 , 1(?) [...] , 1 M124 M115~a M314 [...] , [...] [...] M371(?) , 1 M175 [...] , [...] [...] M263 M218 , [...] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] M314# M338~b [...] , [...] [...] x , 1(N01) M370 M072 , 1(N01) x [...] , [...] x M242~ab#? , 1(N01) M461~q M371 , 1(N01)#? [...] , 1(N01) M124# M115~a M314 [...] , [...] [...] M371#? , 1(N01)# M175# [...] , [...] [...] M263 M218 , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 210. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008408) — 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.