Position in chronology
MDP 17, 225
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Susa (modern southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE, among the earliest writing in human history. It records quantities of commodities under sign-groups whose meanings remain undeciphered: we can read the numerals (1, 2, and so on) but the goods they count are not yet identified. Tablets like this are the direct ancestors of all later writing systems, representing the earliest attempts to track goods and resources in clay. The extreme difficulty of reading proto-Elamite signs — this script has still not been fully deciphered — means the content can only be partially described even by specialists.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet lists several entries, each pairing an unidentified commodity sign with a small count. One item: quantity 1. Another item (M297): quantity 1. A third entry groups what appear to be two or three commodity signs together, with the count lost to damage. A fourth entry records quantity 2, though the commodity is broken away. A fifth entry combines two sign-groups for a count of 1. The final readable entry links three sign-groups, but its number is lost. The rest is too damaged or obscured to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], 1 x M297, 1 M218 M223 M218[?], [...] [...], 2[?] |M218~d+M288| M218, 1 M254~a M372 x M206~d, [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , 1(N01) x M297 , 1(N01) M218 M223 M218# , [...] [...] , 2(N01)# |M218~d+M288| M218 , 1(N01) M254~a M372 x M206~d , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 225. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008423) — 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.